So You Don't Trust Your Wife

It's been almost four years since I did a post on one of the Joe McDoakes shorts, but recently one of the movies I did a post on had enough space before the next movie started on TCM that they put in one of the Joe McDoakes shorts: So You Don't Trust Your Wife.

Since this is a short, and relatively close to the end of the McDoakes series, there's not all that much here. One night, Joe McDoakes (George O'Hanlon) is in bed, while his wife Alice (Jane Frazee) is in the other twin bed in the room. She's worried about finances, so Joe informs her that he has a life insurance policy, and that as a result she'll be taken care of if anything should happen to him.

But this gives paranoiac Joe a horrible idea: he begins to think that Alice will find him worth more to her dead than alive, what with that substantal (for 1955 standards) insurance policy. It doesn't help that everything that happens, from the headling in the morning newspaper to a handyman showing up with an ax. Eventually as a result of all the worrying, Joe winds up in a sanitarium!

As I said, there's not a whole lot here, and once again, it's pretty much a one-joke short. But it mostly works, and I suppose that's a reason why series like this were popular until episode TV led movie studios and theaters to come up with other ways than the full night of movies to compete with the idiot box.

I'm not 100 percent certain if I've mentioned it before, but the Warner Archive did put out a box set of the Joe McDoakes shorts. I haven't checked to see if that set is complete. But you can buy it at Critics' Choice Video and at Amazon. (For some reason, Amazon kept wanting to change my search of McDoakes to McDonalds, which is why I couldn't find it on Amazon at first.