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).

"We'll protect your rights until your last penny is gone!"

Your weekly Clark and McCullough fix is here; Odor in the Court (1934), the most highly regarded film of what's left of their canon. Bobby is more of a dynamo in this film than ever before, if such a thing is possible, and Paul, after so many shorts where he barely speaks, suddenly has laughlines and loads of background throwaway gags. Clark and McCullough have often been compared to the Marx Brothers, a comparison you can take or leave, but it must be said that the Marxes were never, ever as aggressive and completely in-control as Bobby and Paul. Even in Duck Soup, the Marxes' most unbridled picture, Minnie's boys are still outsiders running riot in a world of oh-so serious adults. In Odor in the Court, as in many of their best pictures, Clark and McCullough are scheming insiders bending the world to their whims, no matter how bizarre. I'm particularly fond of the establishing shot of their thoroughly savaged office, destroyed as an unavoidable consequence of their desire to play horseshoes indoors.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3