Two Weeks to Live

Cute film. I wasn't familiar with the characters of Lum & Abner from radio or film, and my grandmother didn't really remember them, but we had a good time watching this.

Two elderly small-town men from Arkansas are playing checkers at a country store when they learn that one of them has inherited a railroad from his deceased uncle. Before they even go talk to the lawyer, they sell $10,000 dollars worth of shares in it to the people in town, in order to raise the money to purchase land for a right-of-way for a spur line into their town.

When they go to the city, they find the railroad is not quite what they thought, and Abner slips down a flight of stairs in the lawyer's skyscraper. After a visit to a doctor, and a mix-up of records, they believe Abner has just two weeks to live, and they must also find a way to pay back the townspeople. A helpful rhyming window-washer with an invisible dog suggests various ways to get money for doing high-risk tasks. Most of the time, they don't complete the task, or decide against it. They also unwittingly miss a couple opportunities to get all the money they need for things they've already done.

In one scene, the movie oddly echoes Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936). In that film, one infamous scene involves a boy who's unknowingly carrying a time bomb, and the boy is taking longer to get to his destination than he's supposed to take. There's a particularly tense scene on a bus. In this movie, a character unwittingly carries a time bomb, takes longer than he's supposed to to get where he's going, and along the way temporarily hands the disguised bomb to a young boy, and to a young girl on a bus. I wonder if this was coincidental or not.

Anyway, my grandmother and I enjoyed watching this.