Fairly
decent Columbia short. Some nice
recurring gags and some good physical comedy for Buster to play around
with. While the story is pretty
trifling, there’s enough amusing stuff here to keep you entertained.
Buster
is a millionaire traveling the world in his boat. When he docks in Mexico, he immediately falls
in love with a beautiful local woman (which, let’s face it, is pretty much
Buster’s MO in most of his movies.)
Unbeknownst to him, however, she’s only leading him on in order to
direct her husband’s fierce jealousy toward him
and away from her secret boyfriend.
Needless to say, there might be a few road bumps along the way to
Buster’s desired happily ever after.
I like
the recurring gags surrounding Buster’s traveling habits. Evidently, he has exactly one outfit for
every country he could potentially visit, and let’s just say they take
“cultural dress” to the extremes – less “cultural awareness” and more “foreign
dress-up!” at play here. That would be
goofy enough on its own, but a series of clothing-related mishaps means
Buster’s one “Mexico outfit” is put out of commission early in the short and
he’s forced to adopt increasingly-incongruous ensembles, hanging around Mexico
in lederhosen or Russian furs. What’s
more, he’s apparently known for getting run out of town, because every time his
crew sees him racing toward his boat, they immediately prepare to shove off,
which results more than once in Buster being deposited in the harbor.
The
best sequence involves Buster wearing a pair of shoes with a bunch of tiny
spikes/nails/points on the bottom. The
second he leaps from the boat onto the dock in them, they get stuck in a couple
of sheets of plywood, so you can tell off the bat that this won’t end well. It culminates in a hilarious scene of Buster
(badly) attempting to dance with his lady love while his shoes are stuck to the
ground. I love watching her dance around
him as he slowly winds and unwinds like a corkscrew!
Other
than that, there’s not a whole lot to write home about. For something made by Americans in the 1930s
and set in Mexico, I’d say it’s only mildly racist (some jokes playing on
“passionate Latin lover” stereotypes,) so that’s a plus. The plot is kind of silly and mostly an
excuse for the gags – nothing especially wrong with it, but a little unmemorable. The whole thing about Buster just being used
by the girl to make her husband jealous paints him as a bit of a schmuck, but
only lightly so. There’s nothing that
reaches His Ex Marks the Spot or MGM
levels of sad-trombone Buster, which is good; he just carries on, heedless of
what’s really going on behind the scenes and undeterred by how anyone reacts.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence, smoking references, and some gunplay.
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