The best Bert Wheeler’s movies

Famous actress Norma Shearer's jewels are stolen… (Star-packed promotional short film intended to raise funds for the National Variety Artists Tuberculosis Sanatorium.)

The Great Elmer and Company, two out-of-work magicians, help lovelorn Jerry Bronson adopt Spanky Milford, to distract him. When Bronson makes up and elopes, the pair are stuck with the little boy. But Spanky inherits a Kentucky fortune, so they head south to Banesville, where the Milfords and Wakefields are conducting a bitter feud.

Hips, Hips, Hooray! is a 1934 slapstick comedy film starring Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Ruth Etting, Thelma Todd, and Dorothy Lee.

Two men running a carnival airplane ride are hired to fly to retrieve what they think are photos for a reporter. Actually, they are retrieving diamonds stolen from a noted gem dealer. As it turns out, their plane crashes on the very estate of the dealer. Thinking the duo are police officers, the dealer offers his home for their convalescence from the accident. Meanwhile, the diamonds have been snatched by a kleptomaniac dog and buried on the estate. When the smugglers track down the pair, they try to convince the dealer that they are officials from an institution from which the two have escaped. Before long, the carnival fellows, the crooks, the gem dealer and his family, along with a platoon of cops, are tearing up the grounds to find where the dog has buried the diamonds.

This wacky vaudeville-style romp casts the irreverent comedy team as feuding co-owners of a drug company, William “Willy” Hobbs (Wheeler) and Claude Augustus Horton (Woolsey), who agree to wrestle each other for the sole ownership of the business. The winner will take the company and the loser must become the other’s valet for a year. But when Hobbs loses, he sends his wife to Florida and schemes to trick Horton. What follows are hilarious hijinks as only Wheeler and Woolsey can pull off!

Two fast-talking insurance salesmen meet Mary, who is running away from her wealthy mother, and they agree to help her run a hotel that she owns. When they find out that the hotel is run down and nearly abandoned, they launch a phony PR campaign that presents the hotel as a resort favored by the rich. Their advertising succeeds too well, and many complications soon arise.

Barbers Willy Nilly and Hercules Glub have opened a barbershop in an Indian reservation, where they have no customers. When suddenly a white man asks for a shave, several Indians of the Oopadoop nation also enter, hearing the usual barbershop banter about foreign debts, they force them to be ambassadors of their nation at the Peace conference in Geneva. Ammunition industry executive Winkelreid is scheming to prevent their mission becoming an success, but the vamp Dolores aboard the ship fails, falling in love with Nilly, and so does Fifi, the toughest person of the world in Paris, falling for Glub. Although Winkelreid is able to steal their secret papers, Nilly and Glub don't give up after being reminded by constant observation of their Indians and enter the Peace conference, which turns out to be a battlefield...

Football scout for the Chicago Packers Rusty Walker signs Harry Lynn, a legendary broken-field runner. Harry won't leave his home town without his girlfriend Maizie Williams. He gets tangled up with gamblers and Rusty's girl Evelyn Corey makes a play for him.

A would-be songwriter and a would-be inventor run a cigar stand and get mixed up in the murder of a song publisher.

New York playboy Danny Churchill is sent to a small town in Arizona, where being sheriff is very dangerous, to keep away from girls, but he decides to open a dude ranch there. He asks his friend Slick, a professional gambler and his wife Kitty, to help him. Slick decides to go there in a cab, driven by shy Jimmy. Jimmy's younger sister Tessie also travels there. There Danny has fallen in love with Molly, but troubles arise for him when the local heavy decides that he doesn't like the ranch and announces running for sheriff. Danny and Slick got the idea that Jimmy would be the ideal candidate, especially because of the fact that the heavy has announced he would kill another sheriff. With some help Jimmy is elected, but Molly leaves Danny with a New York shyster for Mexico. Mitzi, Danny, Kitty, Patsy - Jimmy's sweetheart as well as Jimmy and Slick follow her to win her heart back for Danny, but they are followed by the local heavy and his friend.

A circus performer falls in love with the son of a plantation owner in antebellum New Orleans. When the young man's stepmother objects to the wedding, the couple has to decide if they can make their relationship work.

Two yokels are framed and sent to prison, but wind up playing football on the warden's championship team.

Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey play a couple of broke, hungry vaudevillians who are holed up in a hotel room with a few (tame) lions. They are hired by a movie producer who wishes to send them and their lions to Africa with a great naturalist, in order to make a jungle picture. An earlier expedition by this same naturalist was a failure, because she is afraid of animals. They all head to Africa and the lions are not mentioned again. Once in the jungle they have to fend off the amorous advances of the naturalist, of a vine-swinging native girl, and of a gorilla. They then run into the fearsome Amazon tribe, made up entirely of nubile females. Eventually they disguise themselves as Amazons to avoid being "loved to death." But these disguises lead to further difficulties when the all-male tribe of Tarzans show up for their annual mating ritual with the Amazons.