Wheeler & Woolsey

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Bert Wheeler and Bob Woolsey

Bert Wheeler (born April 7, 1895 in Paterson, New Jersey) and Robert Woolsey (born August 14, 1888 in Oakland, California) were a famous American film comedy team of the 1930s who are almost totally unknown by today's public, although vintage-film buffs have rediscovered the team via cable television and home video.

The former Broadway stars re-created their stage roles in the 1929 movie musical Rio Rita. This established them as movie comedians, and they went on to make very popular comedy features through 1937, all for RKO Radio Pictures except the 1933 Columbia release So This Is Africa. Curly-haired Bert Wheeler played the ever-smiling innocent, and bespectacled Robert Woolsey played the genially leering "big idea" man that often got the pair in trouble. The vivacious Dorothy Lee usually played Bert's romantic interest.

The Wheeler & Woolsey pictures are loaded with joke-book dialogue, catchy original songs, painful puns, and sometimes racy double-entendre gags. Among their better features: Hips Hips Hooray and Cockeyed Cavaliers (both 1934, both co-starring Thelma Todd and Dorothy Lee, and both directed by Mark Sandrich just before he was promoted to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals); The Cuckoos (based on Clark and McCullough's Broadway show "The Ramblers"), Caught Plastered, Peach O' Reno, and Diplomaniacs.

The team faltered in late 1935; the last five W & W pictures were weakened by the combination of bad scripts, lower budgets, and uninspired direction. The team might have continued indefinitely, but Woolsey died of kidney disease on October 31, 1938, ending the partnership. Wheeler continued to work off and on until his death on January 18, 1968. His later appearances were mostly on television; his last theatrical films were two slapstick shorts for Columbia Pictures, filmed in 1950.