Alibi Racket

One of the TCM offerings I had on my DVR had enough time left over in the time slot to run a short, as is the case from time to time. This time, there was enough space for a two-reeler, and the short I saw was a Crime Does Not Pay short that I had actually not seen before: Alibi Racket.

Once again, your "MGM crime reporter" is on hand to tell the viewers how crime does not in fact pay, and does so by going into a story about a certain type of crime. Well, in this case not a specific type of crime per se so much as trying to make it so that crime can in fact pay. There's a gang war going on in town, and one of the gangsters gets bumped off. Now, since there are competing gangs, the obvious thought is that the prime suspect should be Leo Rinelli (Edward Norris).

But, Leo has a brilliant alibi, which is that he was at the movies the night of the murder, and made it unmistakeably clear -- obviously much too clear by the flamboyant way he got everybody around him to note the time -- that he couldn't possibly have been anywhere near the killing when it actually took place. He was expecting a phone call and took it at a very precise time; he made certain somebody spotted and noted what time he entered and left the theater, and so on. Now, since the alibi is too perfect, and since this is a Crime Does Not Pay short, you know things are going to fall apart at the end.

So police inspector Wilmer (Al Bridge) decides to investigate people around him, such as the rest of the Rinelli family. And Leo's brother Joe also has a trememdous alibi. One is that he's known not to like his brother, while he also made it perfectly clear that he had a flat tire at just the right time so that he couldn't be involved in any case. Unsurprisingly, Wilmer doesn't buy any of this nonsense, and has a wild hunch that couldn't possibly pay off except in the movies where the guilty guy has a brilliant alibi but somehow inexplicably fails to corroborate one precise part of it. And that, my friends, is why crime does not pay.

To be fair, this is just a two-reeler, not a prestige movie. And everybody involved is professional. But darnit if the coincidence that makes things unravel isn't just a little too perfect, much like Lou Rinelli's alibi itself. I've seen some better movies in the series, more because they focus on a specific type of crime that makes them more interesting.

Good Morning, Eve!

One of the shorts that TCM ran as part of the Saturday morning block was the early three-strip Technicolor short Good Morning, Eve!.

Leon Errol stars as Adam, looking much too old and certainly not the stereotypically handsome sort or Adam you'd see in other Bible-themed movies. Of course, he's in the Garden of Eden with Eve (June MacCloy), and is tempted with a bite of the apple.

This time, however, the apple sends them out of paradise, if you will, by going on a tour of history. This is an excuse for some sight gags since Adam and Eve are people out of place, as well as an excuse for musical numbers since that's the sort of thing audiences back in 1934 would have loved.

Adam and Eve make a stop in ancient Rome under Nero (Vernon Dent), who is holding some sort of musical competition that allows Adam and Eve to enter since Nero is bored of the traditional competition where he's always declared the winner. There's also a rural-style quartet from the days before it was commonly called country music.

Second is a stop in the England of King Arthur, four years before Warner Bros. made The Adventures of Robin Hood. Finally, Adam and Eve make it to the present, and a beach full of nubile young women in bathing suits, before the ending that reveals....

There is naturally very little plot to Good Morning, Eve!. The humor is dad joke level, but the audiences would have been OK with such dumb humor around the musical numbers. What is the most interesting about the short is that it's one the earliest live-action examples of three-strip Technicolor, coming after maybe Service With a Smile and La Cucaracha as far as shorts completely in the new process. The print TCM showed is excellent, with stunning color:

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton

Going back to another of the box sets I've got, there are still two and a half discs worth of shorts on the Vitagraph Comedies collection. This time, it's the 1912 short The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton.

Once again, the short is only about 12 minutes, so there's not a bunch of plot. Charles Eldridge plays the venerable doctor in the town of Cuddleton, IN, with some sort of advisor who's constantly in his office. Apparently, they need a way to drum up business, and the idea is to bring in a younger doctor to his practice, that being Dr. Baldwin (Earle Williams).

Baldwin is, so we're supposed to figure, considered young and handsome by the standards of 1912, so suddenly, all the young unmarried women in town become hypochondriacs who want Dr. Baldwin to treat them. It's reminiscent, I guess, of the the relationship the Jean Harlow and Edumnd Lowe characters were having in Dinner at Eight. If it's funny how these young women all want to see Dr. Baldwin, it's even funnier when one of the women feigns illness, but it's th old doctor who comes to see her!

Unfortunately, the movie loses steam in the second half. Dr. Baldwin is married, and his wife has finally decided to follow him to town. Only she's supposed to pretend for some reason that she's his sister instead of his wife. Whatever the reason they give, it's not something that makes much sense, and not anything I can imagine the doctor's wife wanting to go along with.

The Lovesick Maidens of Cuddleton isn't bad by the standards of 1912, but it's also as technically limited as most of the shorts I've seen that were being churned out in the early 1910s when new theaters needed new content to show their patrons. I'd also say that there are better shorts from the era, too.

Roast-Beef and Movies

A short that TCM ran as a TCM Extra in a time slot after something else that I watched recently was Roast-Beef and Movies.

A movie studio that's fallen on hard times is looking for new ideas and offers up to $100K for a movie they use. With that in mind, a would-be producer called Gus Parkyakaruks (George Givot, who is not the same actor who would be billed as "Parkyakaruks" in a string of movies from the late 1930s and 1940s) shows up together with two partners, one of whom is played by Curly Howard of the Three Stooges although none of the other stooges are here. Neiter is Ted Healy, who in this time frame would have been the "manager" of the Stooges, the short having been made in late 1933 and released to theaters in early 1934.

Most of the rest of the short is a sort of revue that shows the sort of "movie" that the producers wanted to make, although there's more to it than that. Eventually, the studio boss likes the idea behind the movie and offers Gus and his two partners a contract, but there's a catch that forms the humorous finale of the movie.

There are two things that are mildly interesting about Roast-Beef and Movies. One is the presence of Curly Howard (billed as Jerry Howard) without anybody else related to the Three Stooges. The other one is that the movie is in two-strip Technicolor. Now, Disney had already made a couple of animated shorts in three-strip. I'm not certain how much later the live-action three-strip shorts came out, although I've mentioned Warner Bros.' Service With a Smile from 1934 as a three-strip short with pretty vibrant color.

In any case, the reason for the two-strip Technicolor is because TCM wanted to reuse some musical dance numbers from a couple of earlier movies that had been filmed partially in two-strip. Something that was done in several movies in the early sound era was to have most of the movie in black and white, with Technicolor mostly for a musical finale; it's those numbers that are reused in Roast-Beef and Movies. Other than the Technicolor and Curly Howard, however, this short isn't particularly good.

Roast-Beef and Movies did, however, get a release to DVD as part of one the Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory box sets.

Kissing Time

Back in 2013, I briefly mentioned a night of Busby Berkeley movies and the shorts that aired in between. One that got about a line was Kissing Time, which got no further mention because I had never seen it before. Eventually, it got another TCM showing as part of the Saturday matinee block and, not remembering having brought it up 13 years ago, I recorded it.

Jane Froman is the female lead here, and as I mentioned back in 2013 she's famous for having survived a plane crash in 1943 that was the subject of the biopic With a Song in My Heart starring Susan Hayward as Froman. She plays Miss Sullivan, traveling in an unnamed Latin American country with her father and having met some guy named Ferdie on what is the local festival day, leading the locals to do a song and dance number.

Showing up is an army lieutenant Segovia (Georges Metaxa) togethr with "El Toro" (Don Zelaya), who is the dictator of the country. They're driving a car which was manufactured by the Sullivan company, of which Dad is an executive. When the car breaks down, they think Mr. Sullivan can fix it, not realizing he's only an executive and not a mechanic. But it's an excuse to detain the Sullivans to try to get Dad to service the car.

Lt. Segovia meets Miss Sullivan and immediately falls in love with her as they sing a couple of songs to each other. And then El Toro shows up and sees Segovia singing, and is ticked because he's got a thing for Miss Sullivan and, as dictator, naturally believes that what he says goes so he should be the one to wind up with Miss Sullivan. Screw what she thinks. In any case, El Toro plan to have Lt. Segovia executed.

What you think of Kissing Time is going to depend largely on what you think of the type of music that is being performed in it. The short is from 1933, so the musical stylings are going to be extremely dated to a lot of people. And, I have to admit, this isn't my favorite type of arrangement. That having been said, the stars here do have talent, and for people who like to see the sort of stuff that audiences of the day considered entertaining above and beyond the prestige movies, Kissing Time is a good example.

Not a western, or a poker movie

One of the two-reelers that TCM ran on a Saturday morning at the end of their Saturday matinee block was an early Jack Benny short I had never heard of before: The Rounder. So I recorded it and wrote up this post for a day when I was planning on doing something like mentioning the new Star of the Month or some other shorter post on TCM programming.

This short starts with Benny, playing a man named Bartlett, doing what's supposed to be his drunk bit, stuck in a ladder and trying to get into his apartment because he's lost his key. Eventually, after some patter with a policeman, he gets in through the window, since nobody locked their windows in those days, although to be fair, this being an upper-floor window in an apartment building not directly connected to the fire escape, you'd think it would be hard for a burglar to break in without being noticed.

However, Bartlett doesn't wind up in his own apartment, but that of Ethel Dalton (Dorothy Sebastian). She's commiserating with her friend Mary (Polly Moran): Ethel was out with Mary, but saw that her boyfriend was dancing with another woman. Ethel needs a husband, or at least to be seen with the appearance of having a husband, so Bartlett's showing up unannounced is actually a good thing. Ethel asks Bartlett to pretend to be married to her and act as an escort, which Bartlett is willing to do for a fee.

But then Ethel gets a telegram from her boyfriend Alfred (George K. Arthur) saying that the women she saw dancing with him is in fact his sister. So Ethel's relationship with Alfred is back on, although of course Bartlett doesn't realize this. So things get awkward when Bartlett shows up the following afternoon and then so does Alfred, obviously knowing nothing about Bartlett.

The Rounder is one of the first films Jack Benny made where he wasn't playing himself; you may recall that he was the master of ceremonies in The Hollywood Revue where he was really able to show off his talent. Here, he's not able to do so in large part because the technical limitations of 1930 didn't quite fit with giving Benny's talky brand of comedy a fictional character. Benny, at the time, still really needed to be just behind a microphone. He'd quickly learn, of course, but this short doesn't do justice to his later talent. It's interesting to watch as a misfire, but it's not that great.

House Around the Woman

I've mentioned a couple of John Nesbitt's Passing Parade shorts before. They're interesting, although definitely the sort of thing a lot of people today are going to find old-fashioned. One of the shorts that I hadn't seen before until it showed up in the space after one of the features I watched to fill out the time slot is The Woman in the House.

John Nesbitt, giving his stentorian narration once again, discusses fear and how it's normal to have, especially in the time in which the movie is hitting theaters: it premiered in May 1942, about five months after the attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the United States into World War II. One particularly odd fear is called "anthropophobia", the fear of people, and a dramatized case study of one sufferer of it is shown. That woman is Catherine Starr (not a real name if there's even anything about this story that is real, which I doubt; Starr is played by Ann Richards), a woman who hasn't left her house in 40 years.

Apparently Starr was a schoolteacher in a small English village who was enagaged to be married to a British army officer in 1901. However, a small dispute over the wedding leaves her fiancé to say that he's going to leave the house and she'll never see him again. He has to go with his regiment down to South Africa where the Boer War is being fought. Some time later, she gets a letter of the "we regret to inform you" type that her fiancé died, not in battle, but of malaria in Africa. As a result, Starr can't bear to face the world, although apparently she has money saved up for 40 years of living.

Back in the present day, or late 1941 in the UK, there's that little war going on, and the Blitzkrieg with Nazi airplanes trying to bomb British targets. Starr's village is targeted, which meand that she's going to have to be taken from her house by force to a bomb shelter. Can't they just let her die in peace? But this is just what poor Catherine needs, as she finds a couple of children in the bomb shelter who need a bit of first aid. And don't you know it, but service to others is the best way to overcome one's fear.

Oh boy is the service propaganda on display here. Yeah, there's a war to be fought, but making a short like this with such an obvious agenda came across to me, at least, as a bit cringe-inducing, largely because the message feels shoe-horned in. This isn't one of those service movies or a film set in one of those occupied people where the locals were bravely fighting the Nazis. Instead, it's ostensibly about psychiatry, and then it turns into "how dare you have a mental illness -- do your part".

I don't know if the Passing Parade shorts got put out on a box set, but this isn't the first one I'd watch off of such a box set.

Tragic Russ Columbo

One of the shorts that I had on my DVR waiting for me to post on a day when I had another post for something else to write up. This time, the short is musical two-reeler called That Goes Double.

The short opens up at an office where a young man and woman are both big fans of a radio singer named Russ Columbo, who is in the running to become the King of Radioland. There's an older-looking bookkeper in the office, however, who hates Columbo, because he looks a lot like Columbo and gets stopped by people and asked about it. This character is of course also played by Russ Columbo, who was about 25 at the time the short was made although the bookkeeper looks older.

For some reason this bookkeeper goes to the event where the King of Radioland is going to be named, which you don't think he'd do considering he doesn't like Columbo. There's enough of a crowd that the real Columbo can't make it through to get to the stage, at which point one of the hosts recognizes the lookalike bookeeper and brings him up on stage, thinking it's the real Columbo. The real Columbo shows up and proves who he is by singing one of his songs.

But the real Columbo realizes that having a lookalike can prove useful. There are a lot of PR appearances a celebrity has to make, but doesn't necessarily want to. The real Russ offers to triple the lookalike's salary in exchange for doing some of those appearances. Of course, there's bound to be an issue that the lookalike isn't much of a singer.

Soon enough, a socialite named Gloria, who is an admirer of Russ', wants to host a party with Russ singing one of his songs. This second half of the short is an excuse for a couple of talent agents to bring in various novelty acts, such as ukulele player Roy Smeck, or a trio of dancing roller skaters. The lookalike shows up on the night of the party, but the ruse is found out. There's more to the ruse than meets the eye, however....

That Goes Double is the sort of short that shows a good variety of what Hollywood studios were putting into their musical shorts to try to bring audiences into the theaters. At this time, of course, there was no television to showcase these talents, who are interesting albeit of varying talent levels. Some people may like Columbo's vocal stylings more than other people do.

Warner Bros. was presumably trying to groom Columbo for stardom as an actor, the way crooners at various studios started acting such as Bing Crosby over at Paramount or Dick Powell in a movie like 42nd. Street the same year as this one. Sadly, a freak accident on set a year later saw Columbo get shot by a prop gun but the projectile entered his head with enough force to kill him instantly, or at least that's how the story goes.

The Forest Commandos

Back in 2017, I briefly mentioned the short film The Forest Commandos. TCM ran it some months back during the Saturday matinee block, which is how I got it on my DVR under its own title, and not tacked on to some feature movie to fill out a time slot. So I rewatched it to give it a bit more justice with a longer review rather than just a one-paragraph synopsis.

The opening titles mention that the short was filmed in Technicolor, but whether any color prints survived is an open question as the print that TCM ran was in black and white. It was filmed in 1945, right at the end of World War II, and obviously makes a lot of reference to the war. Northern Ontario has a lot of forest, and forestry products are a key element in the production of all sorts of goods. However, there's not a whole lot of transportation connections since the region is fairly sparsely populated, and the bush pilots are a key element in keeping the region connected; as such, the movie is dedicated to them.

Forests like that are also under threat both from invasive species and forest fires, and a good portion of this short is dedicated to those two, especially the latter since fire is cinematically more interesting than somebody looking through a microsope for moth larvae. One thing mentioned is the series of lookout towers that were used in those days, something very familiar to me living in the Catskill Mountains. A couple of the peaks here in the Catskills still have the fire towers on the top, not for the original use of having fire rangers look for fires and use ranging equipment and ham radio to speak ranges in other towers to determine the exact location of the fire, but now as a sort of museum to promote conservation.

As you might guess, we get the obligatory forest fire, with the second half of the short showing how the fire was fought in those days. The fire they cover also threatens a small village called Gogama, with footage of a possible evacuation filmed. Thankfully the rains come and help put out the fire.

The Forest Commandos is certainly an interesting idea, especially for audiences in the 1940s that wouldn't have had as much opportunity to see such stuff elsewhere. However, a good portion of this is presented almost in the way you'd expect a Pete Smith short to go, except not nearly as funny. It also doesn't help that there's a good deal of footage that's obviously stock footage from somewhere else, making you wonder just how much of the whole thing was staged. It's also a shame that the original color prints don't seem to be available, as the footage probably would have looked a lot more dramatic in color.

The Calico Dragon

One of the non-Popeye cartoons that TCM ran in the Saturday matinee block when they had cartoons was an old Hugh Harman-Rudolf Ising Happy Harmonies entry called The Calico Dragon.

As always, this being a one-reeler, it's not like there's a lot here. A little girl (I couldn't find the name of the actress voicing her) is in bed reading a fairy tale called "The Princess and the Dragon" to three of her stuffed animals: a human doll, a Scottish terrier dog, and a polka-do horse. After reading the story, the little girl goes to sleep.

At this point, the dolls come to life in what is presumably supposed to be a dream sequence, although it doesn't matter either way since this is a cartoon. The three characters head off to a mythical medieval-type land where there are still castles, and dragons for brave princes to fight. This particular dragon has three heads, and the main sight gag is how the three necks get knotted together, which is the way to kill the dragon. There's also the recurring theme of the cowardly dog.

One thing that will be immediately noticed is that, although The Calico Dragon is in color, it's not very vibrant color. That's because Disney had the exclusive contract to use the newer three-strip Technicolor in animation. Other animation had the choice of black-and-white (not uncommon through the late 1930s), two-strip Technicolor (as with this one), or other inferior color processes. Granted, it's not such a big deal in animation. After all, if the human and animal forms aren't supposed to be extremely lifelike, is it such a big deal if the color isn't either?

The Happy Harmonies shorts are also fairly tame. It wasn't until things like Merrie Melodies over at Warner Bros. in the early 1940s, or the Tom and Jerry shorts MGM put out, that cartoons started to get the stereotypical cartoon violence that we all think of today. In the 1930s, most cartoons were a lot less cynical and had a lot more singing and dancing.

I looked it up on Amazon, and I didn't see any Happy Harmonies box sets for sale, which rather surprises me. Considering that many other series got Warner Archives-type box sets, one would think that Warner Home Video might have released such a set. But apparently they only got a laserdisc release back in the early 1990s.

MGM's Historical Mysteries

After my recent post on God's Little Acre, I watched a short from the late 1930s titled Captain Kidd's Treasure. This is billed in the opening credits as "An MGM Historical Mystery" which, for some reason, I thought was another series headed up by Carey Wilson who did MGM's Nostradamus shorts that I've mentioned in the past. In fact this was a completely different series, and Wilson was mostly a writer and sometime producer.

This being a 10-minute short, there's not much here. William Kidd was a privateer, working to keep pirates away from the American colonies, especially New York. But in the late 1690s he fell afoul of the British authorities, most likely for political reasons. He was eventually hanged for this, but before his hanging he wrote a letter claiming to have buried some of the loot he had stolen and would hand over the loot to the Crown in exchange for his freedom. He was hanged anyway. But the legend of the buried treasure remained.

Fast forward to the 1930s, and the framing story for this short has an adventurer who has what he says is a map highlighting the location of Kidd's buried treasure. But, this adventuree doesn't have the money or ship he needs to mount a voyage to the specific location on the map. That's why he's asking a couple of wealthy men if they'd fund the expedition in exchange for a share of the proceeds, since this was before the days where governments arrogated such finds to themselves.

Now, you'd think that with Kidd having been dead for well over 200 years by this point, somebody would have found any treasure buried on land, especially if there were a record in the form of a map. And, unsurprisingly, one of the two rich guys is extremely skeptical. The other one, however, seems more open to listening. The short, apart from the framing story, is a vehicle for each of these three men expounding a theory of what might actually have happened to any theoretical treasure that Kidd might have had, as well as to exactly how Kidd fell afoul of the authorities. These are accompanied by original (as far as I can discern) film with Stanley Andrews playing Capt. Kidd.

There's really not much here, and what there is isn't particularly good. A longer film version of the Kidd story might have been more interesting, and indeed several years later we'd get a film called Captain Kidd with Charles Laughton as the privateer. I'm not certain whether I've seen that one. For some reason I think I have but a search of the blog says I haven't done a post on it.

There were about 10 of these MGM Historical Mysteries made in the late 1930s; I don't think the Warner Archive has compiled them together and put them on a box set. Frankly, other film series are much more interesting.

The Mild West

Since I've got a post up on the new TCM Star of the Month, I figured it would be a good thing to complement it with a post on one of the many shorts that's sitting on my DVR. This time, that short is The Mild West.

This one starts off in the Hollywood version of an Old West saloon, run by Lulu (Janet Reade). Lulu is also a singer, belting out a couple of numbers. Meanwhile, various western movie tropes, or at least tropes for saloons in western movies, show up, including a running joke about how you're not supposed to shoot the piano player. Eventually Lulu's rival Baby Doll (Olive Borden) enters, as does Gentleman Joe. Joe starts playing poker against the house, and wins enough to break the bank. Lulu tries to win the money back, but fails to the point that Joe gets the business, and Lulu. Joe can see the future, announcing that he's bought up all the land in anticipation of the days of automobiles and talking pictures.

Fast forward to the present day, or 1933 when the short was made. Lulu and Joe are obviously much older, and seem to be happy in their dotage. That is, until Baby Doll shows up. She went east and became some sort of success in New York. More than that, she looks like she hasn't aged a day, something she attributes to plastic surgery. She also claims she's going to win Joe from Lulu, which it seems she's spent her whole like thinking about. Sure enough, Joe runs off with her.

So Lulu follows him to New York with the intention to get beauty and plastic surgery treatments of her own to try to rival Baby Doll. And wouldn't you know, but the beauty place she goes to is staffed by the sort of women who break into a Busby Berkeley dance. Lulu gets the plastic surgery, and it works in more ways than one.

The Mild West is an odd little short. People who aren't fans of either 1930s music or movies. probably aren't going to care for this one. I'm not the biggest fan of the music of that era, and the songs are forgettable. But the plot and execution are just offbeat enough that there's something interesting about watching this one.

Rudolph Friml, Jr.

Warner Bros. liked to make a lot of musical shorts, both two-reelers telling a bare-bones story and one-reelers that were more of a spotlight for a singer or a band. One that showed up recently was Six Hits and a Miss.

The opening credits are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they mention director Jean Negulesco, who was still at the stage of his career where he was directing shorts; he wouldn't graduate to features until a few years later with The Mask of Dimitrios followed by a string of interesting movies first at Warner Bros. and then at Fox. The other is that the band here is conducted by Rudolph Friml, Jr. That of course implies that Friml Sr. was someone of enough renown that there would be a need -- or have been a need back in the day -- to differentiate between the two. Sure enough, the original Rudolf Friml was a Czech composer of light operettas; you might know a couple of his works for having been turned into the Jeanette MacDonald movies The Firefly and Rose Marie.

As for the short, it involves Friml and his band, accompanied by a singing group called the titular Six Hits and a Miss for having a female lead and six men providing harmony, at least until the group was broken up by the wartime draft. They sing a song called "You've Got to Know How to Dance". And herein lies another interesting thing about this short. The song was earlier used in the 1936 movie Colleen, and here Warner Bros. reuses footage from the dance number that accompanied the song in Colleen to intercut the new footage. Now, it wasn't uncommon for such footage to be resued, or even movies to be re-released, as that was in 1942 the only way the stuff would get back out in the public and make a few bucks for the studio again. There was no television yet to have a late late show showing old movies.

As for the quality of this particular short, it's OK if not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these one-reel musical shorts since for the most part there's not all that much that was done beyond putting the camera in front of the band and maybe having a pair of dancers or more. So it's everything else going on with Six Hits and a Miss that makes the short worth mentioning.

Maid for a Day

I've mentioned a couple of times now that I've been recording some of the shorts the TCM Saturday matinee block for when I want to blog about something on a day where I have another post that's not going to be a traditional review going up. We've got that again today, and this time the short in question is a Vitaphone two-reeler, Maid for a Day.

Peter Lind Hayes, credited here as just Lind Hayes, plays Freddie Hayden, a college student who wants to become a radio star, this being the mid-1930s. Needless to say, he gets teased by his roommates, although he tells them about the big hit his mother Grace (played by Peter's real-life mother Grace Hayes) had on stage with a song called "My Man Is on the River", performed on a stage with a curtain that depicts black people eating watermelons which of course everybody reviewing the movie today has to mention.

Grace is now working as a maid out on Long Island, where she serves a pair of society matrons. One of course, is her boss, while the other one is the boss' friend, who is running a bizarre little charity scheme, if you want to call it a charity. It's designed to set up a special beach just for the servants, although the real point of it is so that the rich people can have their own private beach without the servants seeing them. In any case, Freddie has gotten a job performing at that benefit radio show, which has elaborate musical numbers because of the live audience that's paying to show up.

It's only revealed later that Grace took on the job of a maid under an assumed identity to learn about maids for a performance she's going to give at some point in the future. She's saved her money from performing, and is somehow able to snag a ticket to the benefit. She has one of the ushers give a message to the producer telling him who she really is, which gets her backstage and ultimately performin in the finale, which just happens to be the song her son is doing.

I'd really only noticed Peter Lind Hayes in the movies he did when he was rather older, notably The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T and the terrible Once You Kiss a Stranger, so seeing him here so young is interesting. Grace Hayes isn't the best, but she's not exactly bad either. The songs are all rather odd choices for a short like this, notably one called "Two Cigarettes in the Dark". WIth all that, I can understand why Maid for a Day is even less remembered than other Vitaphone two-reelers.

Battle of the Century

Because I had a post to do already today on Rock Hudson's being TCM's Star of the Month, I wanted to do a short of some sort. I had a couple from when TCM did a day of movies on the UCLA Film and TV archive, and from that I selected the Laurel and Hardy short Battle of the Century.

Information before the short begins informs us that most of this was for decades considered lost, but most of it is now extant, with a few production stills used to finish a transitional scene involving Eugene Pallette. In the first reel, Stan is a boxer and Ollie his manager/trainer. Stan seems to be going up quite a ways in terms of weight classes, but somehow his first punch manages to knock out his opponent. Except that Stan isn't bright enough to go to a neutral corner so the referee can start the 10-count. Stan later gets knocked out, meaning a very small purse for him and Ollie.

The first reel ends with the missing bit involving Pallette. Pallette is an insurance agent who sells Ollie a policy that will pay out big... if Stan gets injured. So of course, Ollie spends the second half trying to get poor Stan injured, by buying a banana and dropping the peel for Stan to slip on. Stan, unsurprisingly, doesn't slip on it, while other people do.

The climax of the movie comes when a pie maker slips on it and cream pie goes all over the place. As you can guess, this is an opportunity to have a huge pie fight, since pie fights were considered funny back in the day, and that pie fight takes up the final third or so of the short, although since it's a two-reeler that's only about six minutes of pie fighting.

Even then, I felt the pie fight went on too long. And Stan is asked to be too stupid during the boxing scene. Battle of the Century isn't terrible, but there's definitely better Laurel and Hardy stuff out there.

Two by Popeye

I think I mentioned some time back that I started recording the Popeye cartoons that TCM has been running in the Saturday matinee block so that I could have something short to blog about when I had a second post lined up on a day for some reason for another. Recently, I watched a pair of Popeye shorts from 1940, Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive and Puttin on the Act.

A couple of things about these two shorts are interesting. One is that Bluto, who had been introduced to the print comic strip back in 1932, does not appear in either short. There's also the fact that the shorts are still in black and white, even though the Fleischer brothers had made full-length shorts in color, so one would guess that they would have the contractual right to use color here. Mae Questel is also not providing the voice of Olive Oyl, this being the period of about half a dozen years where Questel was not involved before coming back.

In Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive, Popeye gets a new car and of course wants to show it off to Olive. She wants to learn how to drive, but Popeye, instead of teaching her, basically just lets her take the wheel. This leads to all sorts of predictable consequences, especially when you consider the old stereotype about women drivers. (I suppose back in the earliest days of cars when the engines had to be cranked and people wore goggles and overalls because of the muddy roads and topless cars, women might have less of a desire to drive, but those days were long gone by 1940.) Some of the sight gags work, although I have a feeling most people will find this short even more dated than other Popeye shorts.

Puttin on the Act involves Olive Oyl finding a newspaper headling saying that vaudeville is coming back; as you'll know from my mention of lots of 1930s movies about the performing arts, vaudeville had been dying for years. Apparently in this timeline of the Popeye universe, he and Olive had done a vaudeville double act back in the day. So they decide that they're going to restart it. This again gives the opportunity for sight gags thanks to Olive's rather elastic limbs and Popeye's use of Olive as a baton. But there's also the chance to lampoon other Hollywood types as Popeye does a series of impersonations. Those are the funniest bit of this short.

Both shorts last a shade over six minutes, and thankfully my DVR got the timing on these correct so that neither the beginning nor the ending was cut off.

The New Stenographer

Since I had a post on a new Star of the Month today, I decided I ought to do a brief post on a short. This time, I put one of my Blu-ray discs from the Vitograph Collection in my Blu-ray player and watched The New Stenographer.

At 12 minutes, there obviously isn't that much of a plot. A firm puts a want and in the paper for a new stenographer, and gets Lucille (Flora Finch, who according to her bio would have only been 43 at the time the movie was made). She's good at what she does, but the first thing her bosses notice about her is her looks. Unfortunately, she's decidedly homely, to the point that I was wondering whether the studio as a joke had a man dress up as a woman to play the character.

However, Lucille is good at her job so she gets retained, until one day she doesn't show up, having left a note on her desk. The doctor has told her that she's suffering from overwork and needs to take a two-week break. Since this is 1910, it's not like she gets a ton of vacation or, God forbid, sick leave. Instead, she's got a cousin (Florence Turner, about 25 at the time and in the liner notes of the box set as Florence Lawrence who is a different actress) who is going to take over the job for the two weeks. And, wouldn't you know it, but the temp is reasonably good-looking by the standards of 1910.

Since all three men who work at the place notice the change in looks, they're all interested in pursuing this new stenographer, as though none of them have wives of their own back home. But then two two weeks are up, and the punchline is that the temp is already married, and to a rather homely man. The office is "stuck" with the old stenographer again.

The New Stenographer is an adequate enough movie, although I don't find anything particularly special or noteworthy about it. As a short released in early 1911, however, it's always worth watching just to see what set design and fashions were like back in the day. The new stenographer, for example, has a fairly ridiculously large hat of the sort that's way out of style.

Unfortunately, I've got it on Blu-ray which means that I can't really do screencaps since my computer only has a DVD player. It also seems quite surprising that this short doesn't seem to be on YouTube, since it's clearly in the public domain. I did find a similar short called Stenographer Troubles from 1913 on YouTube that was also produced at Vitagraph and stars Florence Turner as well. For the record, I checked under both Florence Turner and Florence Lawrence and the short didn't seem to show up.

Canadian Lancers

I've been recording some of the shorts in TCM's Saturday Matinee blocks, as I mentioned a month or two ago when I did a post on a Barney Bear cartoon. Now, those have been starting the block at 8:00 AM, so they record just fine. Stuff later in the block, not necessarily, as I found when I tried to record the one-reel RKO Sportscope short Canadian Lancers. Thankfully, it was available elsewhere, so I was able to watch it anyway.

The piece nominally focuses on the Halifax Junior Bengal Lancers, a group based in Nova Scotia dedicated to teaching the traditions of the original Bengal Lancers to young people. They train, eventually perform in the Nova Scotia town of Annapolis.

It's not much for a one-reeler, but that's only the half of this short's problems. One of the things mentioned in the short is that the group has an age limit of eight: younger than that, and you're going to have to wait until you turn eight. But poor little Heather is only six! She'd like to join and ride the horsies, but no, she's not old enough. Well, eventually they make her the mascot even though she's not yet eight.

For a short that runs only eight minutes, spending all this time on poor little Heather is a travesty. One would really rather see the horsemanship from the kids actually doing the stuff like using your lance to pick up a ring. Instead, we get lots and lots of that little girl. The other thing that would have been nice is if they could have filmed in color. But this was the dying days of RKO, and one couldn't expect that from the shorts department. Never mind that none of the other studios would be keeping their shorts deparments much longer. This is all stuff that would have decamped to TV. Nowadays, something like this would be a feature on one of those cable or FAST shows.

And in doing a bit of research, today I learned that, totally unrelated to the short, Lancers rosé wine is still produced. Remember them?

Barney Bear

I think I've mentioned a couple of times recently that I've started recording parts of TCM's Saturday matinee block on my DVR. There are the Popeye cartoons which come roughly at 10:00 AM, as well as other cartoons which kick off the block at 8:00 AM. For a while TCM was showing cartoons featuring a character I didn't know much about, Barney Bear, but it gave me the chance to record one called Bear Raid Warden.

As you might guess -- and I'm not giving away much since this is a one-reel cartoon -- Barney here plays a World War II air raid warden working out of a cabin deep in the forest. The short opens up with an own that's asleep but still hooting, and when Barney hears it the hooting sound just like an air-raid siren should sound to him, which gets him out of bed looking for the source. Now, of course, one was also supposed to put out one's lights, or at least black out the windows so that light sources didn't escape from inside the house, and when the owl's eyes open, they let out a ridiculout amount of light.

But that's not the real source of aggravation for poor Barney Bear. He next finds a firefly, and in the fly's defense, it can't not glow. Not that Barney seems to understand this, as he tries to extinguish the fly's glow. That only serves to make the firefly angrier and more determined to keep on glowing, leading to all sorts of sight gags which, to the movie's benefit, mostly work.

Barney Bear was devised some time early by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, who were part of MGM's animation department in the days before the studio had the Tom and Jerry cartoons and, I think, before people like Tex Avery or Hanna and Barbera came to MGM. By this time, however, with the war on, Harman and Ising left the studio to do their part for the war, so this was directed by people not original to the character. From what I've read, MGM "dumbed down" the shorts after Harman and Ising left, but that doesn't really seem to be the case here.

I looked up Bear Raid Warden on YouTube, but it doesn't seem to be available in its entirety.

Surprised Parties

I watched another movie that I had recorded from TCM recently where there was enough time left in TCM's programming slot that they could put in a short. That short was the Our Gang short Surprised Parties, and since I haven't talked much about the Our Gang shorts, I figured I should do a post on this one.

This being a one-reeler, there's not much of a plot here. I don't mean that in a bad way; just to say that you can't really fit all that much into 10 minutes. The movie starts off at a birthday party where the later iteration of the Our Gang kids are, including Robert Blake as Bobby. As the party is breaking up, Froggy is sad, and when the other members ask him what he's sad about, he says it's because he was born on February 29, so he doesn't get to have birthday parties very often. Really. You'd think Mom would schedule a party on February 28 or March 1.

His friends decide to do a nice thing for him, which is to hold a surprise party for him. Now, they make the mistake of holding it at the clubhouse, which means that Froggy is going to show up at the clubhouse while preparations are going on. To be fair, that's not the real mistake since it's not as if the gang has any place else to hold the party. The bigger mistake is that they try to keep the fact that the party is going to be for Froggy a secret so that he really will be surprised. Froggy draws the natural assumption that the other club members don't really care for him. Worse, everybody else is still trying to keep the surprise a secret, too.

So Froggy comes up with the plan that, if everybody else is going to hold a party and not invite him, he'll sabotage their party. He then shows up to the party dressed as a little girl, and speaking in falsetto, with the rest of the movie being the sight gags of how he sabotaged things at the party.

From everything I've read, the general view is that once MGM got their hands on the Our Gang franchise, the quality of the shorts went down. To be honest, I haven't seen enough of the shorts to make a judgment. Judged independently, Surprised Parties isn't bad, although I can see why people might draw the conclusion that earlier shorts were better. This one feels a bit tired, and rushed at the same time as they only have 10 minutes to play with.

I'd probably have to look for DVD box sets, but since the movies were made by various production companies, they don't all seem to be in one box set.