We’ve
gotten through the shorts Buster made for Educational Films in the mid ‘30s,
and now it’s on to the shorts he made for Columbia Pictures shortly thereafter. It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, but by
and large, I think these are a step down from the Educational shorts, which are
inconsistent in their own right. While I
remember liking some of them quite well, there’s a definite cheap feel to them,
a hokey aspect to the comedy that can make them come off a little hollow. General
Nuisance has good moments, but it also reflects the somewhat canned feel
that a lot of the Columbia shorts have.
Buster
is a hapless millionaire (let’s be real – does he play any other kind of
millionaire?) who, having fallen in love with an army nurse, decides to join up
so he can be the proverbial “man in uniform.”
Things don’t go quite as he planned, because it’s Buster, and he soon
winds up trying to injure himself on the army base in hopes of seeing the girl
he loves.
The
general setting and setup has shades of the MGM picture Doughboys, and the short’s best scene is a take-off of one from
that film. Buster, having waltzed into
the recruiting office like he owns the place, doesn’t understand that he has to
have a physical and flat-out refuses to disrobe for the doctor. In Doughboys,
the bit is brief and unenthusiastic because the MGM movies don’t care all that
much about slapstick, but here, the scene is expanded into a fine comic set
piece. I love the insistent way Buster
replaces any article of clothing removed by the recruiting officer or the
doctor, and when he starts trying to undress them in retaliation, it really takes off (come to think of it, it’s
also a bit like the dressing room scene in The Cameraman.)
That
scene is the definite highlight, although the short does have other moments to
recommend it. Apropos of nothing, Buster
does a little tapdancing while wearing pots on his feet, and the sequence of
him trying to get injured is funny, a more muted echo of all of Buster’s failed
suicide attempts in Hard Luck.
Overall,
though? I don’t know. While the film has a fair amount of physical
comedy, it doesn’t quite feel like the right
physical comedy. Buster is mostly up to
his old tricks, but the slapstick going on around him feels a little staged, a
little hammy. I get a much more distinct
“wacky hijinks” feel than I do from the genuine wacky hijinks of his silent
shorts. Part of this is due to the
presence of Elsie Ames, a feature in many of the Columbia films. I can’t deny that she’s a dedicated comic
actress who’s game for anything, but she doesn’t really do it for me. She mugs more than most of the actors Buster
worked with in his silent days, and they didn’t even have sound to convey their
thoughts. The way she does it, the
slapstick feels more like pratfalls than tumbles, and I think that does the
humor a disservice.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence.
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