Allez-Oop (1934)

My feelings on this Educational short are a little mixed.  On the one hand, it has some nice circular gags and cool stunt work from Buster, and I get a kick out of the closing gag.  On the other, there are a few instances where Buster’s character is treated a bit too closely to the chump type he often had to play for MGM.  Overall, I think it comes down on the right side, but those moments still bug me.

Buster, a bashful clock repairer, thinks he’s hit the jackpot when a lovely woman with a broken watch darkens his door.  After some sweet meet-cute dancing around one another, he takes her on a date to the circus, where she falls for a handsome trapeze artist.  Jealous, Buster sets up a trapeze in his backyard in the hope of building up the skills needed to impress her (in case you were wondering, there’s a reason there aren’t too many homemade-trapeze success stories.)

Quite a decent little story here.  Buster’s awkward, roundabout courtship with his customer Miss Stevens is pretty cute and sets up some amusing gags.  There’s a great circular gag involving her grandfather clock, and I love Buster sitting in his shop waiting for her to call, getting increasingly frustrated with the literal false alarms of the clocks that keep going off instead of the phone.  And it’s nice that Miss Stevens is fairly charmed by Buster’s fumbling efforts right off the bat – it’s just the hunky trapeze artist that comes between them.  Speaking of the Great Apollo, it’s here that the short veers into somewhat uncomfortable territory.  I don’t mind Buster getting the “run along, pipsqueak” routine from a rival in his films, but it works so much better when it’s handled in a comic way instead of a “poor Buster” way, and it’s more of the latter that we get here.  It’s a little cringe-y to see Apollo laughing at Buster while he practices his inevitable disaster of a trapeze act.

That epic trapeze fail, however, is great.  While the first half of the short works more with character humor and detailed gags, the second half hits the physical comedy hard.  You only have to take one look at Buster’s rigged-up trapeze to know it’s going to end in tears, but goodness knows that’s not going to stop him.  (Note:  there is background music during this scene, so, as I supposed last week, it was definitely doable in this era.  For my taste, though, it tends a bit too much toward “sound effect” rather than music.  It makes the slapstick feel more buoyant, but I prefer music that follows the flow of the stunts to music that seemingly just reacts to them.)  One thing I love about this scene is that he’s continually problem-solving and trying to improve on his design.  He doesn’t get any better at it, since each fix only reveals a new problem, but he definitely approaches it with the ole Buster “never say die” attitude.  The climax of the short gives us more straight-up action, too, akin with something like Our Hospitality (albeit on a much smaller scale.)  It really doesn’t matter to me that there’s never any explanation how Buster’s characters so often start the film clumsy and end it gracefully athletic, because the former is always such a blast to watch and the latter is always so cool to see.  I’m glad that, even though these shorts don’t have the resources and care afforded to Buster’s independent work, he still had the chance after MGM to tell more of this kind of story.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and a scene of skeeviness from a no-good cad.