Hayseed Romance (1935)

Pretty good Educational short.  I’d say the majority of these films are in much of the same vein, in that most of them have long stretches that are fairly slow and at least mildly ho-hum, but they also have scenes and sequences that are varying levels of awesome.  Hayseed Romance is no exception.  While the slower parts are nothing special, the funny bits in this case are pretty great.

Buster answers an ad in the paper that, in addition to looking for a man to do some farm work, has the tantalizing hook “object matrimony.”  He checks it out and thinks he’s hit the jackpot when he meets the pretty girl who lives at the posted address, but his elation is dashed just as quickly when it turns out that the girl’s dour aunt was the one who placed the ad.  Disillusioned but unable to tear himself away, Buster puts up with tedious work, shabby accommodations, and the aunt’s haranguing.  His real agony, however, remains the chief one:  that he’s in love with the niece but engaged to the aunt.

Even though the two stories don’t actually have a ton in common, the basic setup of accidentally making an undesired match reminds me of My Wife’s Relations.  I suppose the aunt’s demeanor is kind of similar to the wife’s in that short, although the aunt insults Buster far more often than she wallops him (that’s how you know we’re dealing with a talkie!)  But in truth, this is a fairly different situation for Buster, to be attached to one woman and pining for another.  It makes for a different dynamic, with him trying not to be in love with the girl and yet putting up with all the short’s unpleasantness because he still wants to be around her. 

Only a few good comic sequences here, but they’re really good.  I like Buster and the girl doing dishes together on his first night in the house; between their mutual clumsiness, they both have their work cut out for them (those poor dishes don’t stand a chance.)  There’s another a fun bit of the aunt belting away at the organ, obliviously leaving Buster and the girl racing around to keep everything from falling off the shelves as the racket shakes the whole house.

The crowning achievement of this short, though, is Buster trying to go to bed that first night.  It’s a classic Buster scenario, starting with one tiny problem and gradually building until it culminates in catastrophic comic destruction.  All of Buster’s attempts to fix things, naturally, go horribly wrong, and what starts as a light bulb cord that’s too short to reach somehow winds up as a cascade of water that sweeps Buster out of his attic bedroom and sends him tumbling down the stairs.  And yet, as patently ridiculous as that is, it all holds together.  Getting from A to B, all the way to the insane J, proceeds by such steady increments that, looking back on it afterwards, you can totally see how Buster ends up in such a soggy predicament.

Not much to say about the duller parts of the short.  Like I said, it’s less that they’re bad and more that they’re just meh.  Pretty par for the course for the Educational films, but here, the good stuff is good enough that it becomes one of the better ones of the bunch.

Warnings

Slapstick violence.