In my previous post I briefly mentioned the comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey and the actress Dorothy Lee, who starred with Wheeler and Woolsey in a number of comedy shorts and feature films during the 1930's.
One of the first of these films was The Cuckoos, adapted by RKO Pictures for Wheeler and Woolsey from a Broadway musical entitled The Ramblers. In the film, Wheeler and Woolsey play a pair of con artists scamming the wealthy patrons of a posh resort by pretending to be fortune tellers. Dorothy Lee plays the alluring gypsy maiden Anita, a former lover of Bert Wheeler's character, Sparrow.
In addition to fine performances by Wheeler and Woolsey, "The Cuckoos" boasted an outstanding score by popular Broadway tunesmiths Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby. Arguably the most dazzling production number from the film, enhanced by the use of two-tone Technicolor, was centered around the Kalmar-Ruby song "Dancing The Devil Away." The gypsy queen, played by Margarita Padua, sternly warns Anita (Dorothy Lee) of the temptations awating her ... but all she has to do to rid herself of temptation is dance! And dance she does, amid a stage full of outrageously-costumed chorines --
The famous twin piano duo of Phil Ohman and Victor Arden recorded "Dancing The Devil Away" along with their Victor studio orchestra and vocalist Frank Luther in March 1930.
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