In 1925, a group of expatriate Broadway thespians who had moved to the West Coast for film work decided to establish a social club where members could fraternize and enjoy each other’s fellowship. It would be known as The Masquers Club, and its members included at various times such classic movie icons as Joe E. Brown, Frank Morgan, Pat O’Brien, Charley Chase, Edward Arnold, and Charles Coburn. It’s still going strong today—you can even check out the club’s website when you get a notion.
The Masquers Club decided to capitalize on the talent
present in their membership and get into the motion picture production business
in the 1930s with a series of two-reel shorts produced at RKO. They weren’t the only outfit to express
interest in making their own movies; The Lambs Club did a similar series for
Columbia (among the familiar faces were Lynne Overman and Leon Errol) while the
Thalians (featuring the likes of Franklin Pangborn and TDOY fave Grady Sutton) cranked out shorts for Universal. But the Masquers Club’s movies were, in the
opinion of Leonard Maltin in Selected
Short Subjects, “easily the best of these shorts”:
If these two-reelers had one
consistent quality, it was that they tried awfully hard. There was a conscious striving for offbeat
humor, which at times was overbearing, but which often paid off. In Rule
’em and Weep (1932), the sound
effects are always wrong. In a duel that runs through the film, every time the
guns are fired, different noises are heard. And when a horse-drawn carriage pulls up to
the country of Bulvania, where the story is set, the sound effect of a train
slowing to a halt is heard.
Director Mark Sandrich poses with Dorothy Granger and Eddie Borden on the set of Thru Thin or Thicket (1933) |
Eddie Borden has a bit role in another short on the Alpha set—one that I found wonderfully amusing entitled Stolen by Gypsies; or Beer and Bicycles (1933). (Borden figures in a running gag with June Brewster as the couple’s attempts to get in a little passionate necking are interrupted by various characters throughout the two-reeler.) Stolen by Gypsies would the final short in the Masquers’ brief series; the best-known of their efforts (according to the [always reliable] IMDb) is the 1931 classic entitled The Stolen Jools (spoiler alert: the IMDb is wrong), which has been in the public domain for so long everyone’s seen it (if you haven’t—here it is). A promotional short that sought to raise funds on behalf of the National Variety Artists’ campaign to combat tuberculosis, Jools spots an all-star cast in a funny tale about the hunt for some stolen bling belonging to Norma Shearer. (Included in the cast are such TDOY favorites as Buster Keaton, Edward G. Robinson, Our Gang, Laurel & Hardy, and Wheeler & Woolsey.)
Stolen Jools isn’t in this collection, but the remaining shorts that are provide intermittent
laughs and classic film celebrity wattage like Laura LaPlante, Walter Byron,
John Sheehan, and Olaf Hytten in Lost in
Limehouse; or Lady Esmerelda’s Predicament (1933—a funny melodrama
that spoofs both Sherlock Holmes and Hairbreadth Harry-heroics) and Mary Carr,
Russell Simpson, Lucile Browne, Russell Hopton, and Frank McGlynn, Jr. in The Moonshiner’s Daughter; or Abroad in Old
Kentucky (1933—a feud between the Ratfields and Catfields in a tale from
the hills). My personal favorite is The Wide Open Spaces (1931), which
features Ned Sparks, Antonio Moreno, Dorothy Sebastian, William Farnum, George
Cooper, Claude Gillingwater, Frank McHugh, Tom Dugan, and George Chandler. Moreno is a suspected bandito who’s smitten
with heroine Sebastian…but she’s being pursued by crooked sheriff Sparks (as “Jack
Rancid”). When Dorothy agrees to marry
Ned to spare Antonio’s capture (this is decided over a game of checkers), the
two of them are about to be “spliced” when the justice of the peace (Gillingwater)
asks Sparks to produce the ring. Ned
pulls a handkerchief out of his pocket and a buttload of rings in various
sizes falls to the ground. Laughing,
Judge Claude observes: “You’ve been ridin’ a merry-go-round!”
If Mack Swain is pourin'...I'm buyin'. (Mack's the bartender in Wide Open Spaces.) |
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