Nothing like the 60s Skidoo

One of the movies I was watching off my DVR was put in a time slot rather longer than the movie; long enough for TCM to program a short. This was an early talkie that was new to me, 23 Skidoo.

In the early days of talkies, Hollywood needed a lot of talking content, and didn't necessarily know what they had in their old silent stars. In addition to bringing in a lot of people from Broadway, they also brought in any number of people from vaudeville, recreating some of the old skits as one- and two-reelers. In 23 Skidoo, vaudevillean Lew Fields plays a man named Otto Ott, proprietor of a German-style summer beer garden, complete with German accent.

Poor Otto has all sorts of problems, most of them having to do with his battle axe of a wife (played by an actress I'd never heard of, Helen Goodhue, who only made a handful of shorts). She gives him all sorts of hell, but this is really just a foil for Otto to come up with a bunch of snappy retorts. "You don't deserve a wife like me", Mrs. Ott says. Otto repsponds, "I don't deserve rheumatism either, but I've got it."

As you can imagine, this is all fairly corny humor, and somewhat dated. The one-liners, however, are better than the physical comedy, which involves a guy who gets drunk and a bunch of potential new hire waiters. After Ott is done dealing with the waiters, the short ends rather abruptly, but then again it was just a one-reeler.

Hollywood, trying to feel its way to see what would work in the sound era, tried all sorts of stuff, from vaudeville comedy to various sorts of musical numbers and even dramatic stuff. When a short works, such as Burns and Allen doing their shtick in Lambchops, it's memorable even today. But when it fails like 23 Skidoo, it's no wonder stuff like this has become largely forgotten.

So while it's nice that there is in fact a filmed record of some of these performers, it doesn't mean they stand the test of time.