This
one isn’t as funny as I remember it being, but by Columbia standards, it’s
still pretty decent. It has a few
standout bits that I really enjoy, particularly the late entry into Buster’s
annals of police chases.
Buster
is a handyman? Custodian? Something along those lines, working at a new
club run by a gangster. When the head
honcho runs afoul of a rival gang, he starts passing Buster off as himself, to
better steer clear of attempts on his life.
Fortunately, Buster appears as impervious to assassination here as he
does to suicide in Hard Luck, and he
blithely sidesteps his would-be whackers at every turn.
The
short starts off pretty slowly and generically, with slapstick that feels too
canned for a performer of Buster’s caliber.
However, things pick up as soon as Buster begins posing at his
boss. The string of failed assassination
attempts is funny, a series of nice circular gags that all link one to
another. Buster’s ways of haplessly
thwarting the gangsters aren’t always slamdunk moments themselves (slipping on
a banana peel right when he’s about to be gunned down?), but I get a kick out
of the running joke that he doesn’t even notice that the gangsters are trying
to kill him. In fact, not knowing about
the hit out on his boss, he’s actually trying to keep up with these guys in
order to collect a payment from them, and they’re increasingly freaked out by
his uncanny survival.
And as
I said, this short culminates in a really funny cop bit. Buster, having finally got wise to what’s up,
needs a little police assistance.
Because this is Buster and he only knows how to interact with the police
when they’re chasing him, he gets their attention in classic Buster fashion: by stealing a police car and subsequently getting
on the wrong side of every patrolman and beat cop he passes. Before long, he has a caravan of angry
pursuing officers he can bring straight to the bad guys. While the sequence doesn’t hold a candle to
any of the cop chases in his independent shorts, it’s still really funny and a
perfectly-Buster way to solve a problem.
It has
to be said, though – the bit with the phone.
There’s a scene where Buster ends up dangling out an upper-story window
clinging to a phone on this extendable arm thing mounted to the wall. I get that the whole situation is against the
law of gravity and there’s no way that flimsy-looking arm could actually
support Buster’s weight in the manner that it appears to. However, it’s so colossally fake-looking that
it takes me right out of the scene.
First off, you can actually see the wires, and second, the way Buster’s
positioned, it doesn’t even look like the arm is supporting his weight; it just looks like he’s hanging out in
midair and happens to be clinging to this thing. Buster was making movies with way better
effects in the ‘20s – heck, Fatty Arbuckle had better effects in the ‘10s! Not exactly a sterling moment.
Warnings
Slapstick
violence (including gunplay) and some drinking.
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