Wheeler and Woolsey were extremely popular in their day, at their best when their scripts were really pungent or when they punctuated their films with well-honed vaudeville routines. Hips Hips Hooray remains one of their best films and certainly one of the best introductions to their brand of comedy. It is far slicker than most of their films, dressed up with high production values and glossy production numbers. There are none of those long, pun-filled dialogue exchanges which slowed and dated their earlier films, and a greater emphasis on the kind of near-surreal slapstick with which the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields punctuated their films. Quite often, the dialogue takes on a Marxian flavor too, with the same kind of unassailable logic-e.g., that there should be special insurance rates for undertakers, who have to live longer than other people in order to bury them! Produced in late 1933, the film is early enough to escape the full impact of the revised Production Code, and its spectacularly undressed chorine costuming and near-the-knuckle dialogue are still audaciously amusing. William K. Everson