The Bowery Boys - Bowery To Bagdad {1955 - Leo Gorcey & Huntz Hall}

It's Louie's "39th" birthday and Sach buys him an old lamp for two bits. Slip wants to know why Sach bought him a dirty old teapot, so Sach tries to clean up the lamp by rubbing it and out pops the slave/genie of the lamp. Sach has his own kooky ideas as to what to wish for and of course Slip wants money. But what they don't know is that some gangsters have seen the power of the lamp and want to get their hands on it. Also, agents of the royal family in Bagdad have been searching for the lamp for generations. What follows are deadly dames, gun-toting gangsters and knife wielding "towel heads" (as Slip calls them) all trying to get ahold of the lamp.



http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044388/



In 1945, when East Side Kids producer Sam Katzman refused to grant Leo Gorcey's request for double his weekly salary, Gorcey quit the series, which ended immediately. Bobby Jordan then suggested a meeting with his agent, Jan Grippo. Grippo, Gorcey, and Hall formed Jan Grippo Productions, revamped the format, and rechristened the series The Bowery Boys (the film credits appear as: "Leo Gorcey and The Bowery Boys"). Gorcey, who owned forty percent of the company, starred, produced, and contributed to the scripts. The new series followed a more established formula than the prior incarnations of the team, with the gang usually hanging out at Louie's Sweet Shop (reportedly at 3rd & Canal St.) until an adventure came along.



The main characters were Terrence Aloysius "Slip" Mahoney (Leo Gorcey), Horace Debussy "Sach" Jones (Huntz Hall), Whitey (Billy Benedict), Chuck (David Gorcey, sometimes billed as David Condon), and Butch (usually Bennie Bartlett, occasionally former East Side Kid Buddy Gorman). The proprietor of the malt shop where they hung out was the panicky Louie Dumbrowski (Bernard Gorcey, Leo and David's father). Perhaps to emphasize they were no longer teenagers, the "boys" now wore suits; and their mothers, who appeared in some of the "East Side Kids" series were no longer seen.



Like the previous incarnations of the team, the members went through a number of changes over the course of the series. Thirteen actors were members of the team at one time or another. Bobby Jordan, an original Dead End Kid, appeared in the first eight films, but left after being injured in an elevator accident. Jordan was also unhappy with the direction of the series, which favored Gorcey and Hall, excluding the rest of the cast. "Sunshine" Sammy Morrison (aka "Scruno" in the East Side Kids films), declined the invitation to rejoin the gang and took a long hiatus from acting.