Nothing But Pleasure (1940)

A little ho-hum, but decent.  While this week’s Columbia short doesn’t hold a candle to the fun of Mooching Through Georgia, it’s not half as unpleasant as His Ex Marks the Spot.  Very middle-of-the-pack.

Buster has just sold his car to buy a newer model, and rather than pay the freight costs to ship it from Detroit to Chicago, he decides that he and his wife will take a scenic bus trip to go and pick it up themselves.  Unsurprisingly, everything that can go wrong does, both before and after they get the new car.  It all comes to a head with a disastrous overnight stay on their drive back home.

Some good comic sequences of note.  There’s a nice setpiece involving the time-honored tradition of being hemmed in to a parallel parking spot and rocking endlessly between the two cars that are trapping you.  There are a few comic hijinks that arise fairly apropos of nothing and almost certainly for the sole purpose of letting Buster do a variation on the “putting the drunk wife to bed” sequence from Spite Marriage – although the gag isn’t as hilarious here, it’s still entertaining, and Buster uses a Murphy bed to put a little additional spin on it.  If I have a favorite gag, it’s probably an absurd little bit which Buster sets about making soup out of everything he’s pinched from a nearby farmhouse, including an entire string of garlic, a whole pumpkin, and (before he realizes his mistake,) a live kitten – silly but fun.

In general, though, there isn’t too much of real interest here.  The short is just sort of “there,” getting the job done but not going out on too many limbs.  I’m also not a huge fan of Buster’s wife in this short.  By and large, I prefer films where the girl (or woman, by now) is at least a little on Buster’s side, taking part in the action in some way.  Not so in this short – pretty much her entire purpose is to complain and occasionally cry.  Granted, Buster’s bus/roadtrip idea turns out to be pretty ill-conceived, so I can’t blame her for being unhappy, but at minimum, she could try to make a suggestion for how to make things better instead of just lamenting how terrible everything is and reminding Buster that it’s all his fault.  This makes her character really one-note and not especially fun to watch.

I’ve made a few remarks for the latest runs of reviews on silent vs. sound comedy.  This short gives us another entry in the “it’s much funnier when it’s silent” category.  Over the course of events, Buster contrives to get himself wedged into an oversized tire (a tractor tire, if I remember correctly,) and naturally, it winds up rolling down the street with him inside it.  If Buster did any tire-rolling in his silent work, I can’t call it to mind right now, but he definitely rolled in barrels, and this is very reminiscent of that.  However, Buster’s overdubbed grunts of pain and cries for help totally break up the rhythm of the gag and drain a lot of the humor out of the well-timed shots.  Even though you can’t see his expression in this scene, his shouts and cries “break the stone face” in an auditory way.  Yep – this one is much funnier when it’s silent.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, some gunplay, and alcohol references.