Hard Luck is a bit of an odd short for Buster. Like some of his other midrange work (The Goat comes to mind,) its
construction feels haphazard at times, but it has a host of topnotch gags and
comic business. That makes its quality
hard to classify. While it’s not up
there with the greats like (for me) Neighbors
or The Scarecrow, it’s way too funny
to discount.
As the
title suggests, Buster plays a down-on-his-luck fellow here. Everything has been going wrong, and as a
result, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands and off himself. However, his luck isn’t any better when it
comes to committing suicide than it is with anything else, and he’s continually
thwarted in his efforts. In time,
though, he’s swept up in an adventure involving a beautiful girl who might just
have renewed his will to live.
The
main detractor here is the meandering plot.
There are four or five major sequences making up this short, and while I
see the thin but plausible threads connecting each one, I don’t know why these particular sequences were put
together in the first place. There’s no
real reason for a man hellbent on killing himself to end up on a fox hunt, for
instance. Hard Luck isn’t the only Buster short where the story jumps around,
but it’s the one where it feels most noticeable to me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the premise is laid out so
clearly at the beginning, and it’s almost entirely dropped for at least half of
the short? At the same time, the
failed-suicide-plots conceit wouldn’t have been enough to carry the whole short
on its own – while darkly funny, it’s not a story in and of itself, so it
definitely needed something more.
But
although the short is rather a miss in terms of story, its comedy is
first-rate. All the suicide gags are
grim but hilarious, from Buster’s “goodbye, cruel world” blown-kiss farewell in
his aborted hanging attempt to the sheer refusal of any vehicle to run him
over. Naturally, it’s not until he’s
prepared to live that he finds himself in any real danger – he nearly blows
himself with his own campfire, and who but Buster could accidentally tied themselves to a bear? Disaster-prone doesn’t begin to cover
it. And really, the gags are fantastic
throughout, even in sequences that feel extraneously to the story. I’ve mentioned before how much I love the
recurring gag of Buster trying to mount his much-too-big horse with faulty
stirrups (the fact that he keeps coming up with new ways to mount after he’s
already found a method that works is so, so Buster,) and the scene where he
somersaults through a window just in time to receive a cup of tea is as funny
as it is precisely-executed. The short’s
ending gag is most of Buster’s most famous, perhaps in part because it was
thought lost for a number of years. In
Kino Video’s boxed set of Buster’s independent shorts and features, intertitles
explain the missing gag and offer a surviving photo for a visual, but the scene
has since been recovered and can be found online.
The
short also features – who else? – Big Joe Roberts and Virgina Fox. Roberts’s outlaw villain here is just shy of
a mustache-twirler, and it’s the first role that usually comes to mind when I
think of his work with Buster. And
Virginia Fox as the latest “girl” actually gets a bit of physical comedy. It makes me smile when she tumbles headfirst
over the back of the couch.
Warnings
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