One Night in the Tropics
Buck Privates
In the Navy
Hold That Ghost
Keep 'em Flying
Ride 'em Cowboy
Pardon My Sarong
Who Done It?
The only clinker was Pardon My Sarong. After these were finished two things happened that killed the force of nature that was Lou Costello...he almost died from rheumatic fever and his two year old drowned in the backyard pool.
After this Lou was just going through the motions, you could see it. Another killer was some Studio Exec decided that Lou was too grown-up. In the first few movies he smokes cigars, is a con-artist and a bit of a skirt chaser. none of that appears after In the Navy and by the time they were doing their A&C Meet the monsters flicks they had reduced Costello to an idiot.
The first eight are available in a DVD set. My grandson (8) and I have watched them all over and over again in the past three years. He has his favorites and I have mine but we just don't get tired of the really good ones.
Nearly half the movies made before 1939 are lost forever. The actual film stock (the masters) was burned to create the Atlanta burning scene in GWTW. God alone knows what great movies were destroyed, never to be seen again.
As far as their later films, "The Time of Their Lives" is probably the best.
After these were finished two things happened that killed the force of nature that was Lou Costello...he almost died from rheumatic fever and his two year old drowned in the backyard pool.
There was a third thing that killed that force of nature: finances. Lou Costello and Bud Abbott were inveterate gamblers and spenders and, when combined with head-up-their-ass business sense and a couple of unscrupulous business people in the middle of some of their affairs, they ran up such a bill with the IRS that only selling his shares of their later films and television show (Costello had full shares, Abbott---whose problems included a battle with the bottle tied to his need to control his epilepsy---did not, apparently) kept Costello from dying completely broke. Abbott, alas, wasn't to be spared that fate.
Which seems a rather ignominious end for the comic team who basically saved Universal Studios' asses with the success (at the box office, if not exactly as high comic art) of their films.
My personal view is that Abbott & Costello were far better on radio, the evidence of which is available at archive.org. With the right writing (which was a challenge, considering Lou Costello's pigheaded insistence on keeping his brother Pat as head writer, which guaranteed they wouldn't be doing too many new types of material they could well have handled at a high standard, and that some of radio's best comedy writers walked out on them almost as soon as they were hired by them), they could have been even better.
(Did you know: Reputedly, Abbott & Costello's radio contracts invariably required them to perform "Who's on First" as often as three times a season, making it a wonder that people didn't get sick of the routine before their radio careers ended.)