Pest from the West (1939)

Fairly decent Columbia short.  Some nice recurring gags and some good physical comedy for Buster to play around with.  While the story is pretty trifling, there’s enough amusing stuff here to keep you entertained.

Buster is a millionaire traveling the world in his boat.  When he docks in Mexico, he immediately falls in love with a beautiful local woman (which, let’s face it, is pretty much Buster’s MO in most of his movies.)  Unbeknownst to him, however, she’s only leading him on in order to direct her husband’s fierce jealousy toward him and away from her secret boyfriend.  Needless to say, there might be a few road bumps along the way to Buster’s desired happily ever after.

I like the recurring gags surrounding Buster’s traveling habits.  Evidently, he has exactly one outfit for every country he could potentially visit, and let’s just say they take “cultural dress” to the extremes – less “cultural awareness” and more “foreign dress-up!” at play here.  That would be goofy enough on its own, but a series of clothing-related mishaps means Buster’s one “Mexico outfit” is put out of commission early in the short and he’s forced to adopt increasingly-incongruous ensembles, hanging around Mexico in lederhosen or Russian furs.  What’s more, he’s apparently known for getting run out of town, because every time his crew sees him racing toward his boat, they immediately prepare to shove off, which results more than once in Buster being deposited in the harbor.

The best sequence involves Buster wearing a pair of shoes with a bunch of tiny spikes/nails/points on the bottom.  The second he leaps from the boat onto the dock in them, they get stuck in a couple of sheets of plywood, so you can tell off the bat that this won’t end well.  It culminates in a hilarious scene of Buster (badly) attempting to dance with his lady love while his shoes are stuck to the ground.  I love watching her dance around him as he slowly winds and unwinds like a corkscrew!

Other than that, there’s not a whole lot to write home about.  For something made by Americans in the 1930s and set in Mexico, I’d say it’s only mildly racist (some jokes playing on “passionate Latin lover” stereotypes,) so that’s a plus.  The plot is kind of silly and mostly an excuse for the gags – nothing especially wrong with it, but a little unmemorable.  The whole thing about Buster just being used by the girl to make her husband jealous paints him as a bit of a schmuck, but only lightly so.  There’s nothing that reaches His Ex Marks the Spot or MGM levels of sad-trombone Buster, which is good; he just carries on, heedless of what’s really going on behind the scenes and undeterred by how anyone reacts.

Warnings

Slapstick violence, smoking references, and some gunplay.