So You Won’t Squawk (1941)

This one isn’t as funny as I remember it being, but by Columbia standards, it’s still pretty decent.  It has a few standout bits that I really enjoy, particularly the late entry into Buster’s annals of police chases.

Buster is a handyman?  Custodian?  Something along those lines, working at a new club run by a gangster.  When the head honcho runs afoul of a rival gang, he starts passing Buster off as himself, to better steer clear of attempts on his life.  Fortunately, Buster appears as impervious to assassination here as he does to suicide in Hard Luck, and he blithely sidesteps his would-be whackers at every turn.

The short starts off pretty slowly and generically, with slapstick that feels too canned for a performer of Buster’s caliber.  However, things pick up as soon as Buster begins posing at his boss.  The string of failed assassination attempts is funny, a series of nice circular gags that all link one to another.  Buster’s ways of haplessly thwarting the gangsters aren’t always slamdunk moments themselves (slipping on a banana peel right when he’s about to be gunned down?), but I get a kick out of the running joke that he doesn’t even notice that the gangsters are trying to kill him.  In fact, not knowing about the hit out on his boss, he’s actually trying to keep up with these guys in order to collect a payment from them, and they’re increasingly freaked out by his uncanny survival.

And as I said, this short culminates in a really funny cop bit.  Buster, having finally got wise to what’s up, needs a little police assistance.  Because this is Buster and he only knows how to interact with the police when they’re chasing him, he gets their attention in classic Buster fashion:  by stealing a police car and subsequently getting on the wrong side of every patrolman and beat cop he passes.  Before long, he has a caravan of angry pursuing officers he can bring straight to the bad guys.  While the sequence doesn’t hold a candle to any of the cop chases in his independent shorts, it’s still really funny and a perfectly-Buster way to solve a problem.

It has to be said, though – the bit with the phone.  There’s a scene where Buster ends up dangling out an upper-story window clinging to a phone on this extendable arm thing mounted to the wall.  I get that the whole situation is against the law of gravity and there’s no way that flimsy-looking arm could actually support Buster’s weight in the manner that it appears to.  However, it’s so colossally fake-looking that it takes me right out of the scene.  First off, you can actually see the wires, and second, the way Buster’s positioned, it doesn’t even look like the arm is supporting his weight; it just looks like he’s hanging out in midair and happens to be clinging to this thing.  Buster was making movies with way better effects in the ‘20s – heck, Fatty Arbuckle had better effects in the ‘10s!  Not exactly a sterling moment.

Warnings

Slapstick violence (including gunplay) and some drinking.