Bud and Lou

Robert C. Thompson – 1978 – USA
 

Exceptionally cheap TV biopic about the great comic duo Abbott & Costello, depicting their entire careers within 100 minutes and played by Harvey Korman and Buddy Hackett. The sets look repurposed from a daytime soap opera, and the script feels like a first draft by a first-year film student, a bad one. Korman and Hackett, while not A-listers, were two of the best comic actors of their day, and on paper they seem a great pair of candidates to play Abbott and Costello, but everything falls apart when the cookie-cutter dramatic beats start rolling, culminating in the often-mocked hospital “death scene” with Hacket/Costello kicking the bucket right in the middle of trying to take a slurp of a malt in his hand. Korman and Hackett never have to be funny, that’s part of the problem. They play it completely straight. The film would have been better off as a comedy with these actors.