General Nuisance (1941)

We’ve gotten through the shorts Buster made for Educational Films in the mid ‘30s, and now it’s on to the shorts he made for Columbia Pictures shortly thereafter.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen them, but by and large, I think these are a step down from the Educational shorts, which are inconsistent in their own right.  While I remember liking some of them quite well, there’s a definite cheap feel to them, a hokey aspect to the comedy that can make them come off a little hollow.  General Nuisance has good moments, but it also reflects the somewhat canned feel that a lot of the Columbia shorts have.

Buster is a hapless millionaire (let’s be real – does he play any other kind of millionaire?) who, having fallen in love with an army nurse, decides to join up so he can be the proverbial “man in uniform.”  Things don’t go quite as he planned, because it’s Buster, and he soon winds up trying to injure himself on the army base in hopes of seeing the girl he loves.

The general setting and setup has shades of the MGM picture Doughboys, and the short’s best scene is a take-off of one from that film.  Buster, having waltzed into the recruiting office like he owns the place, doesn’t understand that he has to have a physical and flat-out refuses to disrobe for the doctor.  In Doughboys, the bit is brief and unenthusiastic because the MGM movies don’t care all that much about slapstick, but here, the scene is expanded into a fine comic set piece.  I love the insistent way Buster replaces any article of clothing removed by the recruiting officer or the doctor, and when he starts trying to undress them in retaliation, it really takes off (come to think of it, it’s also a bit like the dressing room scene in The Cameraman.)

That scene is the definite highlight, although the short does have other moments to recommend it.  Apropos of nothing, Buster does a little tapdancing while wearing pots on his feet, and the sequence of him trying to get injured is funny, a more muted echo of all of Buster’s failed suicide attempts in Hard Luck.

Overall, though?  I don’t know.  While the film has a fair amount of physical comedy, it doesn’t quite feel like the right physical comedy.  Buster is mostly up to his old tricks, but the slapstick going on around him feels a little staged, a little hammy.  I get a much more distinct “wacky hijinks” feel than I do from the genuine wacky hijinks of his silent shorts.  Part of this is due to the presence of Elsie Ames, a feature in many of the Columbia films.  I can’t deny that she’s a dedicated comic actress who’s game for anything, but she doesn’t really do it for me.  She mugs more than most of the actors Buster worked with in his silent days, and they didn’t even have sound to convey their thoughts.  The way she does it, the slapstick feels more like pratfalls than tumbles, and I think that does the humor a disservice.

Warnings

Slapstick violence.