A Trailer For A Kaput Comedy Team

This is the trailer for Martin and Lewis's last movie, Hollywood Or Bust. (The trailer for Artists and Models, unfortunately, is still nowhwere to be found.) It doesn't have any deleted scenes as some trailers do -- there is one alternate take in there, of Martin singing in long-shot when it's a close-up in the movie -- but it's interesting for its obvious half-heartedness. Hollywood Or Bust is a good film, but Martin and Lewis had already broken up by the time it came out, and Paramount was stuck with the task of selling a movie starring a now-nonexistent comedy team. Their solution, which is less evident in the trailer than in the marketing, was to build the campaign around Anita Ekberg. The trailer emphasizes the cross-country adventure aspect, suggesting that it's a stand-alone movie, and plays down M&L as a team, since they weren't a team any more. The announcer mostly just calls them "the boys."



Compare that to the trailer for their one film that isn't on DVD, Three Ring Circus, from two years earlier, directed by the prolific Joseph Pevney, who passed away last year at the age of 96. (It's on YouTube, and it's not very good, but I still don't get why Paramount didn't include it in their M&L boxes.) This trailer sells them as a popular team and tells us how lucky we are to see our beloved comedians in VistaVision for the first time.



One reason why I'm always annoyed at the absence of trailers from DVDs of old movies is that, for most of those films, trailers are the only place where you can even hope to see deleted scenes or alternate takes.