Wheeler & Woolsey: Dixiana

The comic duo of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey star as Peewee and Gaylord, two would-be southern gentlemen of leisure, out to make the most of their sister Dixiana's pending marriage to wealthy plantation heir Carl Van Hone. Peewee and Gaylord's madcap behavior eventually leads to tensions between Dixiana and Carl's mother, Birdie. The course of true love is threatened as the frenzy of the Mardi Gras festival heightens everyone's passions. When roguish upstart Royal Montague challenges Carl to a duel over the bride-to-be's hand, Dixiana turns in desperation to her wacky brothers for help.

Filled with nostalgia for the Old South and featuring an early screen performance by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, Dixiana is a colorful operetta brimming with the type of low comedy popularly preformed on showboats up and down the Mississippi River. Plantation life provides Wheeler and Woolsey with perfect targets for their anarchic practical jokes culled from the backrooms of vaudeville and burlesque. A lavish twenty-one minute color finale infuses cinematographer J. Roy Hunt's evocative imagery with a dazzling Oz-like spectacle.

• comedy