Jail Bait (1937)

While this Educational short is pretty decently written and features some good gags from Buster, it doesn’t quite hold up as well for me as some of the others I’ve recently reviewed.  I feel like it suffers a bit too much from the staid feeling of being a sound short instead of a silent one, but I can’t quite tell for sure – when I first checked out the Educational shorts a few years ago, Jail Bait was one of the first ones I saw, meaning it helped form my introduction to Buster’s two series of low-budget talking shorts.  It could be that I just developed an impression of it being slower with noticeable dead air, whereas the same sense wasn’t as prominently to me as I got more accustomed to the format, and that first impression lingers with me on rewatch.  I couldn’t say for sure, but I do know that, despite its genuine merits, it doesn’t hold my interest as well as some of its contemporaries.

Buster is a newspaper office boy plagued by love and inadequate means to buy an engagement ring.  Meanwhile, a reporter friend of his has a lead on an important murder case and cooks up a plan to apprehend the killer and collect the reward money.  The only hitch is, he needs to get the police off the scent while he follows his lead.  Enter the desperate-for-cash Buster, who agrees to temporarily turn himself in for the crime in exchange for part of the reward when his friend bags the real killer.  What could possibly go wrong?

Some really fun gag sequences here.  I love Buster’s increasingly-overt attempts to get himself arrested by a disinterested cop, doing everything apart from literally asking to be caught.  His antics are a riot, and the bit builds to a nice climax.  I also enjoy the gags about the various hindrances to Buster’s incarceration that begin the second he’s locked up (like discovering that the bars on his window have been sawed off.)  Both strings of gags have an amusing “What’s a fellow gotta do to get thrown in jail around here?” air about them, which is even funnier considering how many of his independent shorts involve being doggedly chased by police officers bound and determined to bring him in.

The film also features a recycled gag from Buster’s silent days.  Like in Convict 13, Buster takes out a guard and steals his uniform at precisely the wrong time:  moments before the start of a prison riot.  But while, in the former film, the gag leads to the famous scene of Buster battling rioting prisoners with the aid of a rubber ball on a rope, Jail Bait takes a different tack, showing Buster’s cunning as he evades prisoners and guards alike.

Like I said, I can’t tell if this short drags more than others Buster made around the same time or if it just seems that way because of my first impression of it, but it’s there just the same.  I can’t shake the idea that the short would work infinitely better set against a backdrop of jaunty music.  As is, I feel the emptiness in the scenes of wordless humor, the noiselessness hanging in the air and muting the impact of the gags.

Warnings

Slapstick violence and some gunplay.