Elf Esteem

Just in time for Christmas Eve Eve, a very special Christmas Biffle and Shooster short; Elf Esteem by Nick Santa Maria... in glorious VitroColor! Enjoy!

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The Opera-tives

Just in time for Friday the 14th, another brand-new vintage Biffle and Shooster comedy written by Nick Santa Maria. Enjoy!

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Friday Ends n' Odds

Foistly, a new Biffle and Shooster comedy short written by our pal Unca' Nick Santa Maria! As an exhibitor might have written in a trade journal in 1934, "Renting and Raving is a real honey of a picture. All my patrons really go for the antics of these two nuts. Take my advice and book this one! Hot dog!".

Secondly, Hook, Line, and Sinker (1930) starring Wheeler and Woolsey (and a pre-personality Hugh Herbert) has finally reared its head over at archive.org. And it's a nice print, too.. not the blurry, washed-out TV print with the re-shot titles and the muddy audio that has been making the rounds on bargain DVDs. You can download it in five different flavors, 3.7 GB being more than adequate for DVD. Hopefully this means that Half Shot at Sunrise (1930) isn't far behind! And while I'm at it, I should also mention that Harold Lloyd's swansong The Sin of Harold Diddlebock is now available at archive.org, too! I'm not much of a fan of Harold's last picture, but the first ten to fifteen minutes are undeniably brilliant and promise a movie that Sturges couldn't deliver.

Thoidly, also from archive.org comes this silent, battered, Dutch-subtitled print of Gum Shoes (1935) starring Monty Collins and Tom Kennedy. If you've never seen it with sound (and if you can't read Dutch), you may be surprised to discover how easily you can follow the plot, a testament to Columbia's strict adherence to the forms and formulas of silent slapstick comedy (not to mention their habit of recycling gags and scripts).

Biffle and Shooster in "The Case of the Missing Plot"

You wanna know what Third Banana writers do when they're not writing about classic comedians? They trade arms for hostages! And then they make up fake classic comedians! I have the team of Farnsworth and Katz, and Nick Santa Maria now has Biffle and Shooster. Nick is second to none when it comes to writing snappy gag dialogue in the Ryskind/Kaufman/Kalmar/Ruby vein. Vot a talent, that boychik!

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