The Chemist (1936)

Another win in my book.  While on rewatch, I’d say The Chemist isn’t as strong as Grand Slam Opera or Blue Blazes, it stills follows the main characteristics of those shorts.  It’s quite well-made, despite the overall lack of budget/breathing space to work with in the Educational stuff, it has a good many quality laughs, and you can feel Buster’s influence on the comedy.

Buster is an outside-the-box inventor looking to make good.  His specialty is concocting special “powders” that do all sorts of outlandish things, like instantly increase the size/strength of any person or animal or, regrettably, cause immediate and overwhelming attraction (to be fair to The Chemist, it’s now 2016, and genre stories are still incorporating plots about “love” brought about by supernatural/magic/sci-fi influences without acknowledging how creepy that it from a consent standpoint.)  His real boon, though, is a just-add-water powder for noiseless explosions.  The breakthrough earns him a lot of attention, but – just his luck – it also catches the notice of a trio of crooks who see the potential in easy, discreet safe-breaking.  It takes all of Buster’s cunning to escape the thieves and bring them to justice.

Some great gags here.  I love the opening sequence with Buster’s laboratory breakfast (soft-boiling eggs in a beaker, making toast over a Bunsen burner, etc.)  It’s a fun bit that feels at home next to the creative-cooking scenes in films like The Scarecrow or The Navigator.  I get a kick out of the sight gag of the goldfish that, thanks to the enlarging/strengthening powder, gets swapped out for an entirely, blatantly different kind of a fish but is still amusingly passed off as the same animal.

It’s also a good short for the ol’ Buster initiative.  There’s his tenacity in cooking up crazy ideas no one at his university believes in, and once he gets nabbed by the bank robbers, he uses all sorts of imaginative techniques to challenge them.  It doesn’t matter what obstacles Buster is faced with.  Be it a rival, a machine, an army, a show of force by nature, or a herd of cattle, I just need him to be resourceful in meeting the problem head-on – as long as he’s doing that, all is right in the world.

My absolute favorite example of that here comes when the thieves have chased Buster back to his lab, where he locks himself inside and uses a neat bit of foley artistry to convince them he has a gun.  I love this bit, because the creativity is so Buster, and yet, the very sound-based nature of the comedy in this scene means it’s a type of gag we really haven’t seen from him before.  I love watching him create the illusion of gunfire (under extreme pressure and with limited resources, because how else does Buster do anything?)  Seeing it, I always imagine it as an indicator of what Buster’s sound career could have been like if he’d been able to maintain creative control of his films, resulting in this very funny (if somewhat wistful) might-have-been gag.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, crime, and an unfortunate “love powder.”