Sit Tight

Joe E. Brown was Star of the Month a few months back, and one of his films I hadn't blogged about before is Sit Tight. So I recorded it and recently sat down to watch it.

Brown plays Jojo, who works for Winnie (Winnie Lightner), a woman who runs one of those 1930s-style gyms that look antiquated today and make you wonder hoe they could have gotten anybody fit. Winnie is trying to whip a bunch of old farts into shape, and while Jojo is supposed to be an assistant, he doesn't really seem to provide much help.

Cut to an office. Tom (Paul Gregory) is a clerk who's trying to move up in the company managed by Mr. Dunlap (Hobart Bosworth). Tom's girlfriend Sally (Claudia Dell) is the boss' daughter, and she decides she's going to use her influence to get Tom a better job. Tom is none too happy with this, as he wants to succeed on his own, and not without his girlfriend pulling the strings; after all, what would he do if he were working somewhere else. Sally is enough of a jerk about it that when Tom refuses Sally's help, she decides to have her dad fire Tom!

This firing is how the two couples -- Tom and Sally on one hand and Jojo and Winnie on the other -- wind up becoming intertwined. Jojo, as with a lot of Joe E. Brown's 1930s characters, is a bit of a braggart who can't really back up what he's talking about; this time, he's claiming to have been a champion wrestler which he really isn't. He gets attacked at the gym, and somehow Tom winds up there to pin the guy who's chasing Jojo.

This gives Tom and Winnie an idea. Tom is going to become a professional wrestler, at least just to make enough money so that he can be independent enough to marry Sally. Winnie can be Tom's manager, while Jojo will be the trainer. So they start to practice, and Tom winds up being pretty darn good at wrestling. But Sally thinks this is an undignified profession, and her father hates it even more. So just as Tom is about to get a shot at the title, Mr. Dunlap is going to try to take it all away from Tom....

Sit Tight is a really odd little movie, because it looks as though the original intention was to have it be a musical comedy. There's still a bit of singing, as well as an odd dream-like sequence when Jojo is being pinned in which the action suddenly shifts to an ancient harem, a scene that makes no sense in the context of the picture. Brown was good at physical comedy from his circus days and the fact that he kept himself in reasonably good shape. The wrestling scenes have all the comedy that you'd see in the football movies of the day, which is a two-edged sword, since those 1930s college football movies aren't necessarily funny.

I think Sit Tight is another of those movies that would really benefit from being on one of those four-movie box sets that the Warner Archive used to produce. Instead, it only seems to be on a standalone DVD, and I'm not certain I'd want to pay that sort of a price for it. But watch for yourself