Love Nest on Wheels (1937)

The Educational shorts end with a bit more of a whimper than a bang.  Love Nest on Wheels isn’t bad, but it’s nothing special.  It’s most notable for copious Keaton family involvement and a number of gags cribbed from the Arbuckle-Keaton short The Bell Boy.

Buster and his hillbilly family run the crumbling Van Buren hotel.  They haven’t had a paying guest in ages and are on the verge of foreclosure when a pair of newlyweds come by.  The decrepit hotel doesn’t impress them much, but Buster has a better idea – the family is in possession of a reasonably-nice trailer, and if he can convince the newlyweds to buy it, they’ll have enough money to cover their rent.  The only problem?  The small matter of the live cow inside it.

Lots of gags from The Bell Boy here, the most prominent ones being the mule-drawn elevator (and hijinks therein) and the little overhead track for the basket carrying hot towels between the kitchen and the in-hotel barber shop (and the incidental trouble Buster gets into over it.)  While the story here is a lot more straightforward than The Bell Boy, which is tons of fun but really meandering, pretty much all of these gags are funnier in the original.  As always, there’s something to be said for the atmosphere of silent slapstick over sound slapstick, and I think the country-bumpkin shtick going on here also makes the comedy a little slower, which messes with the pacing of the gags.

However, I do appreciate that there’s quite a bit of slapstick here, even if a fair amount of it is stuff we saw to better effect in The Bell Boy.  For gags that are novel to this short, I could watch Buster failing to pull a cow out of a trailer all day, and Buster’s sister Louise has an awesome tumble out of a barber’s chair.  Additionally, the worry over the trailer builds to a really well-timed climactic sight gag.

Like Palooka from Paducah, this is another Keaton family short, and, also like the aforementioned short, it gets by in large part because of that fact.  No Joe this time around, but mother Myra, sister Louise, and brother Harry all appear in the short as members of Buster’s onscreen family (I believe this is the only time that Harry played more than an extra in any of Buster’s films, so that’s kind of neat to see.)  But the nostalgia casting doesn’t end with the Keatons.  In keeping with the Fatty Arbuckle-themed short, Arbuckle regular Al St. John plays Buster’s uncle, the guy responsible for letting the cow get into the trailer in the first place.  I have to admit, this casting sort of fascinates me.  Even knowing that it’s him, I can scarcely recognize him at all.  He looks so different than the gangly figure he cut in the Fatty Arbuckle days (I mean, I get it – those films were made 20 years before this one, but I haven’t seen anything he made in the intervening years to fill in that long gap between what he looked like in the ‘10s compared to the ‘30s.)  He acts different, too; he doesn’t pull the same goofy faces as he did in those silent shorts.  Not to mention, this is also the only time I’ve heard his voice, which is always an interesting experience when it comes to silent film actors.

Warnings

Slapstick violence.