Film Summary CCLXXXII (Two Weeks to Live)

There's something impressive about a movie that only has an hour and 13 minutes and yet has so much story in it.

We start off in the city of Los Angeles in a law firm wear two lawyers are eagerly looking over obscure maps in an attempt to find a nowhere Backwater town (Pine Ridge, Arkansas*)
Their intended goal is the find locations of the two men Lum and Abner who have recently become the inheritors of Railroad line.
Which it turns out is pretty good news for our to esteem gentleman. Living in their tiny little town with no properly paved Road no vehicles and most likely no running water. It resembles a town from the 1850s. So it's only about 90 years out of date. Now the great irony of this whole thing is the law firm had sent the mail direct to these gentlemen as fast as humanly possible via Air-mail at a time when that was considered extremely expensive. What they didn't count on is the local mailman only delivers mail around the town when his mailbag is actually full.
Stating that to do so otherwise would just be a pointless waste of time and would wear out the rubber on his soles. But eventually the letter does arrive and the two gentlemen are quite excited by their new adventure. They're going to gather up as much money from the local townspeople as possible to up all the farmland around their railroad. So they can have trains run up and down from one side of the country to the other. With continuous use hoping to bolster the town and create some much-needed Revenue.
But before they can do any of that the two men have to head off to California to talk with the locals at the law firm. Once they get there they're taken aback this huge city with its massive buildings with confusing people. Mr.Abner is baffled, ''everybody keeps asking him to call them a taxi'' So he calls them Taxi and he can't understand why.
They eventually do make it up to the law firm which happens to be on the 24th floor of a very high skyscraper. Mr. Abner doesn't believe in using elevators. Claims that they're way too dangerous.

Unfortunately the railroad they inherited is unused and has been broken down for many a year. All the money the town and giving them to do an investment has already been spent on buying up the land around the other farms and the law firm is charge them an additional fee for acquiring the railroad leaving them $9,000 out of cash for the town and with no money to get them home.
And to top it all off Mr.Abner has fallen down as soapy set of stairs resulting in a minor injury.
They have to take him to a local Doctor, who happens to be working in the same building as the law firm. Unfortunately the nurse that's working wasn't paying anybody that much mind (too infatuated with her boyfriend over the phone.) And screws up the name of two different patients. Mr.Abner is now mistakenly declared ''terminally ill'' and he only have two weeks to live.

Perhaps the most unrealistic thing about the movie is how nice this doctor's handwriting is. Just look at it! You ever known a doctor to have good handwriting.

This as you can imagine is really putting a damper mood on the men. As their penniless and near destitute. However an idea does come into Lum's head after talking to a local window cleaner. He says that since Abner is going to die in two weeks anyways he might as well try to do a few of the extremely dangerous jobs that no one else in the city will wish to do. Such as painting the flag poles on top of the buildings and doing incredibly ridiculous stunt work like jumping from one biplane to another. But all these Ventures end up going south. As Mr.Abner a fairly old man who lives with fairly basic values from a small town with no real education who constantly screws up the jobs. The one job he didn't screw up which had to do with the two biplanes was run by a fraud who ran away with all the money. Luckily for them one of the last job's to be offered was by a strange woman for claiming that if Abner stayed one night in a haunted house they could get $1,000. But this turns out to be a loser as well. She wants to kill the Abner in the haunted house and pretend that he was her husband, so she can collect insurance money and run away with her husband.
He enters the haunted house completely convinced that it is in fact ''haunted'' by real life ghosts.

He also brings (unbenounced to him) and explosive violin case that he supposed to leave at the haunted house thinking that it's only a normal instrument. And unbenounced everybody the house is currently not haunted by ghosts but by Nazis. Who are secretly stationed in this house looking to exploit the American war effort. Luckily mr. Abner gets so freaked out; '' thinking that the Nazis are in fact real ghost'' that he leaves the violin, runs out of the house and is meant by a FBI agents who happened to be monitoring the house at that time. Luckily for everyone involved** the violin explodes killing all the Nazis and freeing up Mr.Abner to get away from the FBI. Only to discover later that a reward (of $10000) is being offered to the person who left the explosives in the house. For a considerable defence of the war effort.

And now we come to the final bit of the film where a random scientist is promising Mr. Abner $10,000 if he takes a ride on a rocket ship heading for Mars. But Mr.Anber is already quite concerned. He doesn't know where Mars is and he thinks he's going to die that very day.
Especially considering a day before a harp was delivered to Mr.Abner with the mistake being that he was a composer. Mr.Abner took this as a message from ''Beyond High'', to get practicing for his newly awaited existence.
This part of the movie was both funny and a bit sad. I'm sitting there laughing at the man but I'm also a bit teary-eyed. It's just so sad. This poor guy thinks he's about to die and that angels have literally delivered him a harp.
And finally after all this the law firm shows up again only to offer Mr.Abner$20,000 ($17000 after reductions, tax and fees) for the right to his railroad. Although the railroad itself isn't worth anything the land is quite valuable. And you think everything finally going to go well. But Mr.Lum is sitting in the rocket waiting to be deployed because Mr.Abner finally discovered that he was not in fact terminally ill and now refuse to get into the rocket.
The whole movie ends on the rocket accidentally being deployed with Mr.Lum inside of it. Not making it to Mars the planet but instead 9 miles away from Mars Iowa.

And I know that I've missed out and a bunch of other small subplots in this film too. Like I said there's a surprising amount here. If you get the chance you should definitely give it a look. It's on YouTube I believe. it's in the public domain and it's easy enough to find.

The only problem with the film is some of the strange editing. Which might not be fault of the film itself. It could be a weird television edit. We may never know.

*So it turns out the town of Pine Ridge is actually a real place. It's this tiny little town in Arkansas that used to be called ''Water''. They renamed it because of the popularity of these Lum and Abner film.

**I guess it wasn't all that good for the Nazis themselves. But it is 1943 so they are considered a proper enemy and it's not like the regimes going to last that many more years anyways. So no fuss no foul.