Slapstick Sundays
The Big Dog House (1930) Directed by Jules White & Zion Myers
This week In The Balcony, we’re spotlighting a leading example of the “What th’ HELL?!?” type of films (you know, you used to spot one of them on the late, late show and wonder the next day if you’d actually seen it or if it was all a result of eating a giant bowl of Mint Chocolate Chip ice cream before bed).
Imagine, if you will, a pre-code film about a pair of sweethearts who work in a department store. The evil owner of the store has impure designs on the girl, so when he’s caught stealing funds from the company safe he kills the security guard and frames the girl’s sweetheart, who is swiftly convicted and sentenced to Death Row. After much drama and melodrama the boss is fatally injured in a drunken car crash and confesses. Can the girl rush to the prison and halt her true love’s execution at the last minute?
Well, that sounds like a pretty decent picture. Who’s in it? Bette Davis? Dick Powell? Warner Baxter? Ummm…. Try Rover, Fido, Ranger, and Bootsie. Yes, it’s a Dogville short!
The Dogville series was concocted by Jules White and Zion Myers for MGM in 1929; the idea, see, was to produce a series of “All Barkies” that parodied popular films. Hence, Trader Horne begat Trader Hound; we also got The Dogway Melody, All Quiet on the Canine Front, and the film shown here, The Big Dog House. The series ran for nine films from 1929 to 1931. Although produced on a generous budget, with good costumes and nice sets, the series is notable today mainly for the obvious use of piano wire to manipulate the dogs and make them “act”. Our audiences 'round here, on those rare occasions when we've shown one of these things,
have been horrified by these so-called “comedy” shorts, and probably with good reason.
I don’t think any of these puppies (you should pardon the expression) are available on DVD but they do show up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time, where a new generation can say, “What th’ HELL?!?”
Earlier Slapstick Sundays offerings...
Slipping Wives (1926) Directed by Fred Guiol
"A few of the true L&H characteristics shine through in Slipping Wives, but not enough." -- Randy Skretvedt.
Here In The Balcony, we'd never seen this particular 2-reeler before, and had little to go on besides Mr. Skretvedt's casual dismissal of the film. We were therefore truly delighted to find that Slipping Wives is actually a good film and a valuable piece of the Laurel & Hardy puzzle; it's another showcase for the Stan and Babe to work together (they are rarely seen apart in this film). Following Duck Soup by only a few weeks, Slipping Wives is clearly a worthy marker on the road to Hal Roach's official teaming of the duo. Seeing the two films back to back, you can certainly see that the two men worked brilliantly together.
This is another of the Hal Roach "All Star" comedies, meaning there were no stars in it except the fallen kind. Hence Priscilla Dean, once one of the biggest stars on the Universal lot, now frantically trying to stay in front of the cameras (she failed, and within five years -- after a stint at Monogram, of all places -- she would retire). Miss Dean is distraught because her husband, a temperamental artist, ignores her. "He only kisses me on Sundays and holidays," she complains to a friend. So the friend gives her some useful advice: find some dumb sap and convince him to make love to her; that'll make the husband jealous and he'll be more attentive. (Hey, Hal Roach wrote the story, what, you're gonna tell him no?) Anyway, no sooner does the friend say "dumb sap" than there's a knock at the door and Stan Laurel is standing there, delivering a shipment of paint. Mr. Hardy, as the family butler, attempts to show Mr. Laurel where the delivery entrance is... and naturally, ends up wearing the goods. So in comes Miss Dean, who asks the butler what the visitor wants. Oliver Hardy, standing 
there covered in what appears to be about four gallons of glossy white, summons up all the dignity he can muster, and responds "It's something about PAINT, ma'am." Sublime moments like this would happen many times in L&H comedies, and it happened here first.
Another highlight of the film is Laurel -- who stays for the weekend under the guise that he's a famous novelist -- describing the plot of his new book, a retelling of Samson and Delilah. It's a long piece of pantomime worthy of Chaplin. Meanwhile, Mr. Hardy is assigned the task of watching after Mr. Laurel when he'd much rather crack his skull with a 2x4. Of course, in grand L&H tradition, it's Mr. Hardy that ends up on the receiving end of most of the injuries, to body and to dignity.
Slipping Wives (which was based on an idea by Hal Roach) would be remade in 1935 as The Fixer-Uppers, one of the best comedies the team would ever make. For that reason alone, this seminal version is worth seeking out. On its own, though, it's quite a worthy film in the canon... the two men even share a bed, a tradition that would continue throughout their entire cinematic career.
You'll find Slipping Wives on The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy, Vol. 8.
The Sex Life of the Polyp (1928) Directed by Thomas Chalmers
James Thurber once wrote that the problem with humor writing is the nagging feeling that the piece you’ve been working on for two days was done better and more quickly by Robert Benchley in 1924. Alas, time has not been kind to Mr. Benchley, who at the time of his death in 1945 was the most famous humorist in the country, a cross between Mark Twain and… well, and nobody in particular. Prior to his death, though, he did all his best writing, including essays and theatrical criticism for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Benchley’s daily writing routine was severely affected by his funeral, so much so that the final volume of his memoirs has yet to be completed.
His film career was a happy one for us and a not particularly appreciated jaunt away from his writing desk for him. Benchley's film debut, The Treasurer’s Report, a short comic lecture he’d written years earlier for a Broadway review, was one of the first all-talking pictures released in the wake of The Jazz Singer and was a success for Fox; thereafter, Bob (he doesn't mind if I call him that; he only really got upset when you called him Snuggles) was never far from the movie cameras. Besides a series of popular (and Academy Award recognized) short subjects for MGM, he starred in shorts and features for Paramount, RKO, Disney, and other studios. Notably, you’ll find him in the film classics Foreign Correspondence (Benchley also served as one of the writers of this Hitchcock film, and it’s easy to tell which lines he wrote: the hilarious ones), I Married a Witch, and the Hope-Crosby vehicle The Road to Utopia.
Today, though, we’re going to find him in his second screen appearance for Fox, The Sex Life of the Polyp, a 1-reeler produced in 1928. Robert Benchley's shorts were filled with... that is to say, his short subjects were filled with humorous essays presented by Robert Benchley, the hapless "expert".
Professor Benchley is giving the Woman’s Club a follow up to his previous well-received speech, Emotional Crises in
Sponge Life, which defined the 1001 things a sponge must think of before it can reproduce. He reminds the audience that a positive sponge, if mated with a negative sponge, will reproduce only positive sponges, and vice versa. “This is known as Lipscomb’s Law,” he tells us, after the scientist who “discovered it quite by accident one day in the bathtub.”
And so, on to the sex life of the polyp. (“If you can call it a sex life.”) It seems that the polyp is a tiny aquatic animal that does not resemble a small dog in the least. A polyp, however, can choose to be either male or female depending on the mating partner that’s handy. (“Which saves time and expense.”)
Prof. Benchley introduces the gathering to the test polyp: “We called her Mary, after Ethel Barrymore.” After several weeks of care and nurturing, “Mary became more like a child of our own than a polyp. Of course, she looked more like a polyp.” A photograph of Mary illustrates her personality and charm, impressive even as polyps go. In Bermuda, chosen for its romantic reputation and ready supply of stud polyps, a male polyp is introduced to Mary. The male is not given a name, so we’ll call him Steve, after Martin Landau. Soon, Steve does what he can to “bring the lady around to his 
point of view”: he throbs with passion and glows with phosphorescence, something most of us male Balconeers have done from time to time, or at least attempted. In any case, the scientists removed Mary from the Petri dish and substituted a much less attractive female polyp; Steve didn’t care, he just kept a-throbbin’ and a-glowin’. Ditto when they replaced the female polyp with first a button and then a piece of cornbread. Eventually, however, Steve gave up and turned into a female and the scientists decided to forego further polyp experiments and concentrate on some animal that “takes its sex life a little more seriously.”
The Sex Life of the Polyp is one of the laugh-out-loud funniest short subjects ever, and can be found with several other Benchley shorts on the Kino Video DVD compilation Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin. The majority of
his best short subjects were produced by MGM and are currently owned by Warners, which shows them from time to time on Turner Classic Movies and has released a smattering of them as bonus material on various DVDs but refuses to give us a much-needed boxed set of all MGM Benchley films. Apparently, they're waiting to release it as a tie-in with that last volume of memoirs.
For more information on Mr. Benchley, visit the Robert Benchley Society at www.robertbenchley.org. For more information about polyps, visit HERE.
Duck Soup (1927) Directed by Fred Guiol
Late 1926. When last we saw Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, they’d appeared together in supporting roles to Glenn Tryon in 45 Minutes from Hollywood, their first time before the cameras together in a Hal Roach film, although they shared no scenes. In the weeks since, Stan Laurel has been occupying most of his time as a writer and gag man for Roach films, while Babe Hardy seemed to have a bit part in a different film every day around the Lot of Fun.
Laurel – real name Arthur Stanley Jefferson – adapted a short farce written by his father, a Music Hall manager back home in England, called Home for the Honeymoon. The lead roles – a pair of tramps who move into a temporarily empty mansion and pretend to be the owner and his maid – are to be played by Syd Crossley and Laurel himself. According to L&H expert Randy Skretvedt, no one is quite certain why Crossley was replaced by Hardy as filming began, but we are certainly glad he was. The result – Duck Soup – is not only the first true Laurel & Hardy film, but of the three they’ve been in together so far, it’s the first one that’s actually funny.
Laurel and Hardy are Hives and Maltravers, a pair of ne’er-do-nothings relaxing in a park when they’re informed that the Fire Department is shanghaiing hoboes to be forced into service battling a wildfire. Attempting to escape from dogged Fire Chief Bob Kortman, whose face looks as though it’s made of petrified firewood, L&H hide in the
abandoned mansion of Colonel Blood, who is off on a camping trip. When a young couple comes along looking for a home to rent, Hardy masquerades as the abode’s owner, and Stan – not for the final time in his illustrious career – dons the façade of the witless housemaid. To complicate matters, the Colonel returns early and the maid loses his skirt in front of the Fire Chief.
Following the release of Duck Soup in early 1927, the film was virtually unseen for nearly fifty years and was considered lost, replaced in the Laurel & Hardy canon by its 1930 talkie remake, Another Fine Mess. A 35mm print of Duck Soup was discovered in Europe in 1974; it can be found on Image’s The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy Vol. 5, although the restored English titles are poor and inaccurate. The German DVD release (a bonus on Kinowelt’s March of the Wooden Soldiers disc), while not as good a print as the American version, does a better job with the titles.
Kinowelt Version: “Two honorable gentlemen, who would have been rich if they hadn’t been too late for the
handout.”
Image version: “Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. Two fine gentlemen who have known better days… but not recently.”
Duck Soup has several laughs, mostly courtesy of Laurel, whose bit as the hapless maid is quite funny, particularly when he tries to flirt his way out of an encounter with the prune-faced Fire Chief. This is the first L&H movie that is worthy of consideration as anything other than a novelty.
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