Like Temple and other child stars, Withers would falter as she progressed into her teen years - although she was still going strong at age 13, when she starred in Pack Up Your Troubles (1939) with the comedy team the Ritz Brothers. As recently as 1937, she had been named one of the Motion Picture Poll's top ten box-office favorites, registering at No. 6. That same year Fox had given the Ritz Brothers - Al, Jimmy and Harry - their own starring series, starting with Life Begins in College.
In Pack Up Your Troubles, filmed at the beginning of World War II but set in 1917 during WWI, Withers plays Colette, the American daughter of French military man Hugo Ludwig (Joseph Schildkraut), who is presumed dead. The Ritzes, as struggling vaudevillians who have been sent to France as caretakers of some Army mules, blunder into the village where Colette lives and befriend her. Mayhem ensues when they are mistaken for German spies and make their escape in a hot-air balloon.
Colette meanwhile has discovered that her father is alive after all, working undercover as an intelligence officer behind German lines. In an unlikely development, to warn her father that he is in danger, she braves her way into No Man's Land and eventually to the German High Command. Then, daring barbed wire and bullets, she finds her way back with an important message for the French Chief of Staff.
In addition to Schildkraut (an Oscar winner for his supporting role in 1937's The Life of Emile Zola), the supporting cast includes Fritz Leiber as Ludwig's assistant, who poses as a village cobbler, and Stanley Fields as a bullying sergeant. In a role that is mostly decorative, Lynn Bari plays a beautiful German spy.
A reviewer for Australia's Sydney Morning Herald wrote that, "It was inevitable when war broke out that Jane Withers would have a war picture... As becomes her propensity for fixing things for anyone in difficulties, Jane packs up everyone's troubles in a way which shows that had she gone much further the war itself might have been stopped." Overall, the reviewer considered the movie "a lively production, well produced and well balanced with the buffoonery of the Ritz Brothers."
Frank S. Nugent wrote in The New York Times that, "Although the prospect of Jane Withers, the first World War and the Ritz Brothers all in a single picture seems calculated to shake the nerves of a sensitive cinemagoer, it at least serves to remind us that Miss Withers is growing, even if the art of the Ritzes is not. It should also be noted in favor of Pack Up Your Troubles that it packs off the boys in something other than a vehicle, for a welcome change." In faint praise, Nugent added that there were moments when the brothers "seem almost funny again."
Withers was soon to end her association with Fox. Beginning in 1941, she moved on to star in low-budget films for Columbia and Republic, with lukewarm results. She drifted away from films after 1947 but made an impressive comeback in a character role in George Stevens' Giant (1956). She also enjoyed success on television in various series and, especially, as Josephine the Plumber in Comet cleanser commercials. She has remained active, appearing at various public events and lending her voice to animated films.
The Ritz Brothers, who had sprung from vaudeville with an act that recalled The Marx Brothers, broke into films in the mid-1930s and earned a contract with Fox, where they were featured in the studio's Grade A musicals starring the likes of Alice Faye and Sonja Henie. In 1937 Fox began starring them in their own films, but the brothers complained about the quality of the scripts. After Pack Up Your Troubles, they were so dissatisfied that they left Fox for good to work at other studios as well as in nightclubs and, occasionally, on television.
By Roger Fristoe
