The death of his long-time performing partner Robert Woolsey was not the only hardship shouldered by film comic Bert Wheeler in the fall of 1938. Charlie Hill, Wheeler's partner in the Palm Springs motel The Lone Pine, died two days after Woolsey, a tragedy that forced the struggling venture into receivership. Worse yet, Wheeler's wife of two years, actress Sally Haines, filed for divorce, leaving him broke and alone. The only recourse for the former Ziegfeld Follies funnyman and veteran of two dozen films was to return to work. Wheeler's first project as a solo act was The Cowboy Quarterback (1939), an RKO Radio Pictures remake of the Joe E. Brown football comedy Elmer, the Great (1933). The property had first seen life as a Ring Lardner stage play, produced on Broadway in 1928 by George M. Cohan. (Joseph L. Mankiewicz adapted the material for the 1929 baseball picture Fast Company.) Reworked for Wheeler by Fred Niblo, Jr. (whose mother was George M. Cohan's sister), The Cowboy Quarterback casts Wheeler against type as a Montana hayseed turned pro quarterback, whose rags-to-riches saga puts him in Dutch with Chicago gangsters and sets him in competition for the love of a pretty girl against future Perry Mason star William Hopper (still billing himself as DeWolf Hopper).

By Richard Harland Smith