Cooks and Crooks (1942)

• 34%
• 1942
• Comedy
• Harry Edwards
• Edgar Kennedy
• Sally Payne
• Dot Farley

This one is about as politically incorrect as any in the Edgar Kennedy series, since Edgar ends up in black face impersonating an applicant for a cook's job, Buelah Jackson, whom he had scared off for plot reasons, and who was last seen doing the old feets-do-your-stuff routine. Edgar has become a mail-order Private Detective and a client soon knocks on his door with a job for Edgar. He is to go to a house and get the treasure hidden in a wall. But the residents, Vi and Danny, two crooks in hiding, won't let him in the house. Vi refuses to cook and Danny agrees to let her hire a cook, and makes it clear that all of Vi's other attributes (of which it is implied, with a heavy-handed smirk, there are many) more than offset her lack of culinary skills. Edgar encounters Beulah Jackson, an applicant for the job, outside the house and scares her away and she leaves her agency papers in her wake. Edgar then puts on black makeup, dons a dress, knocks on the door and is hired. And has soon made a shambles out of the house and his cooking assignment. Things get messy. Especially after the police show up and make Edgar take them to the man who hired him. Once there, his client gives Edgar another job... helping him paint an invisible fence.