Mixed Magic (1936)

Lightweight but funny, a classic “bumbling Buster makes good” scenario wrapped in vaudeville sensibilities with some good gags to keep it moving.  The Educational shorts hit a fairly low stretch in the middle, but they shape up quite nicely towards the end.

Things are finally looking up for a down-on-his-luck Buster.  He’s just gotten a job as a magician’s assistant, and more importantly, he’ll be working alongside the girl he’s fallen for, the magician’s other, lovelier assistant.  But because this is Buster we’re talking about, it can’t be that simple.  His own onstage fumbles and mishaps wreak enough havoc on the show, but when his disgruntled predecessor shows up to take his revenge on the magician, it really hits the fan.

I’m always a sucker for these types of gags from Buster, novelty stage-act stuff inspired by his vaudeville days.  Here, we have a slew of magician’s tricks gone wrong, with Buster continually giving the game away with his mistakes and misunderstandings.  I love when, thinking the magician has stabbed the girl for real instead of in a trick, Buster faints dead away, and who doesn’t love a fish bowl strapped to someone’s back?  The pinnacle of this short is undoubtedly the duck gag, where Buster is below the stage and supposed to send up ducks from alternating trap doors at the magician’s prompting, and naturally, it’s a total disaster.  It’s a fun sequence that builds the comedy really well.

While the botched show is definitely the highlight of the piece, there are some fine gags that come before it as well.  There’s a bit of surprisingly-funny Great Depression humor that you wouldn’t typically expect in a slapstick comedy, but Buster makes it work.  Really, he played a number of characters over the years who had to hustle for their supper, especially in his independent shorts, so he was no stranger to making jokes about being poor.  Here, I like the running gag of the near-penniless Buster being beset upon by hoboes who wind up eating better than he does.

There really aren’t any major knocks against the short – it’s solid through and through.  All I can really say against it is that it kind of just gets the job done.  While it’s consistently funny with good jokes and some nice physical comedy from Buster (you can’t go wrong with Buster getting tangled up in the flies!), it doesn’t quite pop the way that the other shorts he made around this time do.  In other words, its only fault is that it isn’t as fun as Grand Slam Opera, Blue Blazes, or The Chemist, but it’s still perfectly respectable.  Hey, I’d even say it’s tighter and funnier than some of the lesser Fatty Arbuckle shorts, but in all honesty, I’m not complaining at all.

Warnings

Slapstick violence.