B-Western Wednesdays: Trouble in Sundown (1939)

As he opens the Sundown State Bank for another day of fiduciary operations, president John Cameron (Howard C. Hickman) boasts to the customers waiting in line that the vault where their money is stored is “burglar-proof”—because he’s the only one with the combination.  Then the door to the vault swings open, and the dead body of the night watchman falls to the floor.  (Apparently it is not watchman-proof.)

The bank has been robbed of its $90,000 in cash reserves…and the depositors?  Well, they are not happy campers.  Suspicion for the theft falls on Cameron; after all, he’s the only one who could have conceivably opened that bad boy up!  As upright and outstanding citizens Tex (Monte Montague) and Dusty (Ward Bond) start riling up their fellow Sundownians for a party (necktie, that is), Clint Bradford (George O’Brien) just happens to ride into town with his sidekicks Andy (Ray Whitley) and “Whopper” (Chill Wills).  Clint, who’s kinda sweet on Cameron’s daughter June (Rosalind Keith), tells the beleaguered bank prez to hie himself to a cabin in Red Rock Canyon and hide out there since the crowd is turning ugly (and that’s not much of a turn).

Naturally, Cameron is innocent of the robbery: the mastermind behind the heist is crooked real estate agent Ross Daggett (Cy Kendall), whose eevill scheme is to get control of the bank so he can then get his greasy fingers on all of the ranches in the valley (Cameron is carrying a lot of these people on the bank’s books, and they won’t be able to settle up until after the fall cattle drive).  Daggett sends Tex and Dusty to Red Rock Canyon so that those two goons can terminate the banker with extreme prejudice, making it look like a suicide.  They’re able to coerce Cameron into signing a suicide note, but before they can continue with their foul deed Clint comes riding up with deputy Larry Harrison (Jack Perrin).  There’s a shoot-out; Deputy Larry is gunned down…and if that robbery deal wasn’t bad enough Cameron has a murder rap to beat.  (Not one of his better days.)

The last time we visited with R-K-O cowboy star George O’Brien on the blog was when his offbeat oater Gold Raiders (1951—with the Three Stooges!) was reviewed on B-Western Wednesdays in 2012.  Best known among classic movie fans for his John Ford Western silents (The Iron Horse, 3 Bad Men) and the F.W. Murnau masterpiece Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), by the time the movies started to talk O’Brien had a new career as a cowboy star—he inked a contract with independent producer George A. Hirlman in 1936, and those B-Westerns were subsequently released by R-K-O.  Then R-K-O decided to eliminate the middleman, and O’Brien began to make programmers for the studio directly.

I caught Trouble in Sundown (1939) on The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind™ some time back, and all I can say is that it better take care if I find it’s been creeping ‘round my back stairs.  (Hey…when was the last time you read a blog post with a Gordon Lightfoot reference?)  All seriousness aside, I’ll state up front that it’s also available on a 3-DVD set entitled the George O’Brien Western Collection…but having not viewed it in that fashion, I simply have to go by what I DVR’d from TCM.  Their print is in better shape than it should be, though its opening titles are a little rough (I strongly suspect the film’s negative got the “Movietime” treatment that a lot of the entries in the R-K-O library received when they sold many of these titles to TV).

Despite the shabbiness afforded its opening titles, Sundown is not a bad little B; O’Brien is a real two-fisted he-man hero, and he doesn’t have to resort to any fancy Dan singing or strumming a guitar (well, he’s got Ray Whitley to do that: Ray sings Prairie Winds and Home on the Prairie with the Phelps Brothers).  Chill Wills is never my first choice as a comic relief sidekick but he’s easy to take, and Rosalind Keith is sweet as George’s girlfriend (the wrap-up to this one suggests that the two of them will be tying the knot).

Sundown’s strengths include a really first-rate supporting cast: you’ve got Ward Bond paying his dues as one of the henchmen, and Cy Kendall—known for his villainy in serials like The Green Hornet (1940) and Jungle Queen (1945)—doing that voodoo that he do so well as the unscrupulous Daggett (his name should have given him away).  (Also, too: Cy is billed as “Cyrus W. Kendall”—nice goin’, podnuh!)  There’s a plethora of veterans in this one as well: John Dilson, Lloyd Ingraham, Tom London—it’s a casting call for a Lone Ranger episode!

I also enjoyed how George rounds up the bad guys in this one—I won’t give it away, because if you haven’t seen it you should—a very clever plot twist courtesy of Oliver Drake, Dorrell McGowan, and Stuart E. McGowan (from a story by Charles F. Royal).  B-Western director David Howard directed this and several other entries in the O’Brien franchise, keeping things moving like any good traffic cop.

The original title of this oater was A Knight in Ghost Town—which I actually like better, and it would have spared you that lame joke I made several paragraphs earlier.  I really dig the R-K-O Westerns because even when they were forced to skimp on the budgets…they always have a professional-looking sheen.

Book Review: Film Noir at Twenty Four Frames Per Second

My Classic Movie Blog Association colleague John Greco—in addition to being a writer and photographer—is not an individual content with letting grass grow under his feet.  He’s the author of two Kindle books on classic films including his latest, Lessons in the Dark, and a mystery entitled Murder with a Twist.  In addition to contributing to two e-books of past CMBA blogathon essays—Words, Words, Words! and Planes, Trains and Automobiles—he owns and operates three blogs including a personal one and one devoted to his photography, watching shadows on the walls.  (Me?  I’m lucky I was able to get back into the blogging game without taking time out for a nap.)

Twenty Four Frames is the title of John’s classic movie blog, and an e-book containing essays from that site, Film Noir at Twenty Four Frames Per Second, was published in 2014; the price was right ($2.99) and the topic of the articles within is my particular classic movie meat, as you probably well know.  There are twenty-one in all, covering a lot of familiar “Dark City” territory: Night and the City, Ace in the Hole, Kansas City Confidential, etc.  There’s even a nod to neo-noir with a piece on the 1990 film After Dark, My Sweet.

What I enjoyed most about John’s book is that much of its content covers those films that sometimes get skipped over as film fans are feverishly leafing through the Noir Encyclopedia.  One in particular is Night Editor (1946), which has its antecedents in old-time radio (it aired on various networks and various coasts from 1934 to 1948).  It’s a “bargain basement” effort from Columbia that does feature a laudatory performance from actress Janis Carter—who, according to John, is a “nasty, treacherous, cold hearted man-eater” bringing nothing but bad news for the movie’s hero, luckless William Gargan.  I also read about this movie in a book that will be reviewed on the blog in this space next week, and since it’s available for purchase on the Sony Home Video release Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume 2 it’s going to be one I track down at the first available opportunity.

John brings new insights to lesser noirs like Roadblock (1951) and Crashout (1955), and like so many of us classic movie nuts, received his education growing up watching old movies on TV (he hails from Brooklyn, and received essential exposure to WNEW’s Channel 5 as a youngster).  He was most taken with The Maltese Falcon (1941), and kudos to him.  “The world of noir evoked a shadowy universe of danger and violence crammed with duplicitous women and dangerous men,” Greco writes in the introduction.  “It didn’t matter what side of the law they were on, and sometimes it was hard to tell.”

Greco’s background in photography is a major plus when appreciating the stylized cinematography that’s the hallmark of good noir movies, and John’s prose is lean, mean, and to the point—no need for lacey artifice here.  To me, the best thing a critic can bring to the table is to make you want to seek out films you haven’t crossed off your list yet…and on the off-chance you have seen it, instill in the reader a new appreciation for the movie—or better still, tempt them into sitting down with it again.

“So, grab a bottle of the hard stuff and settle down in a comfortable chair,” invites John seconds before the first review, the Poverty Row classic Detour (1945), commences.  (I’m already in Count von Comfy Chair, but the hard stuff will have to be Crystal Light Fruit Punch.)  “It’s going to be a perilous journey down those darkly lit mean streets.”  You can’t beat the price, and I think you’ll enjoy what is undeniably a brisk, efficient read.

“Want to get away from it all? I offer you…Escape!”

Yes, I know the title of this post sounds like another lame joke in the never-ending saga of Escape (1940) vs. Escape (1948).  Honest to my grandma, it’s not—I promised that there would be swag to give away in future, and I’m here to make good on that.

Escape was an anthology series broadcast over CBS Radio from July 7, 1947 to September 25, 1954.  It was often referred to as the “sister program” of “radio’s outstanding theatre of thrills” (Suspense), but like siblings there were noticeable differences.  Escape eschewed the high-wattage celebrity guest stars that Suspense was well-known for; occasionally the program would feature a big name (Victor Mature, Vincent Price) but mostly cast roles in their stories with the crème de la crème of “Radio Row”—William Conrad (who alternated with Paul Frees as the opening announcer on Escape), John Dehner, Parley Baer, Lawrence Dobkin, etc.

The stories on Escape were also of a “high adventure” nature, as boasted on the show’s legendary opening (usually spoken by second announcer Roy Rowan): “Escape!  Designed to free you from the four walls of today for a half-hour of high adventure!”  The scripts for the series mined a wealth of short stories from such luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Robert Louis Stevenson (the list is a lengthy one).  Despite the fact that “the stars’ address” moved Escape around to different time slots like a life-or-death game of three-card monte…and in addition, had difficulty securing sponsors (it was sustained throughout most of its on-the-air run), it was a favorite of many listeners and remains so today (I consider it, Suspense, Gunsmoke, Dragnet, and The Whistler to be my top five favorite [non-comedy] OTR shows).

Back in June of 2014, Radio Spirits asked me to write liner notes for a 10-CD collection that was eventually released as The Hunted and the Haunted.  There’s some truly outstanding radio drama in this set, with tales adapted from authors like Ray Bradbury (“The Earthman”) and Alexandre Dumas (“The Second Shot”).  I have two copies of this set to give out to loyal members of the Thrilling Days of Yesteryear faithful…and the best part of this is that it will require minimal effort on your part if you want a chance to win one.

Since the last giveaway I did here at TDOY was back in July of this year (with Suspense at Work), the usual “thirty-day rule” need not apply to this contest.  (Of course, if you won one of the Suspense sets and feel guilty about entering another giveaway so soon, we wouldn’t think less of you if you opted out; in fact, we would be so proud that we’d construct monuments in your honor and compose folk songs in tribute.)  Just drop me an e-mail with “The Hunted and the Haunted” in the subject header so I know your entry is legit (I’ve been making a concerted attempt to remove my name from any mailing list that even reeks of political content—the Giant Meteor can’t get here soon enough for me) at igsjrotr(at)gmail(dot)com.  The deadline for this contest will be 11:59pm EDT next Saturday, September 24; I will select two winners via the all-powerful numbers generator at Random.org and inform them of their good fortune so that they can provide me with snail-mail details (so that I might send their swag on its way).

Residents of the blogosphere, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your chain e-mails!  Remember, cartooners—Thrilling Days of Yesteryear is the phrase that pays!

Forgotten Noir Fridays: Arson, Inc. (1949)

L.A. fireman Joe Martin (Robert Lowery) has demonstrated he’s got a little moxie on the ball when he rescues some cheap furs (rabbit, etc.) from a fire at a wholesale furriers’—only the furs retrieved from the blaze don’t match the more expensive pelts listed on the insurance claim.  An investigator from the arson detail has already been murdered during the fire department’s inquiry, so Joe is pressed into action to look into the matter.  Martin stops by the residence of the owner of the store, Thomas Peyson (Byron Foulger), to conduct some questioning—and is informed by schoolteacher Jane Jennings (Anne Gwynne) that the Peysons are out for the evening (she’s babysitting Junior Peyson).  When Mr. and Mrs. P get back from nightclubbing, Martin peppers Peyson with uncomfortable inquiries regarding a fire that occurred in their apartment…which the Peysons didn’t report.

Peyson has good reason to be nervous: he’s in cahoots with unscrupulous insurance agent Frederick P. Fender (Douglas Fowley).  (Wait…does this mean the insurance guy is Freddy Fender?  The Before the Next Teardrop Falls and Wasted Days and Wasted Nights guy?  Hokey smoke, Bullwinkle!)  Peyson is deep in debt to Fender, and Freddy P. is trying to help his pal by filing false insurance claims while keeping the real furs under wraps (evening wraps, natch) in his personal warehouse.  Suspicious of Martin and the inconvenient truth that he’s asking too many questions, Fender assigns his right-hand man, pyromaniac Pete Purdy (Edward Brophy), to “shadow” Martin in an attempt to see if he’s on the up-and-up.  Joe manages to fool Pete (it’s not too hard—it is Ed Brophy, after all) into thinking he’s susceptible to taking a dishonest bribe or two, particularly after an incident in a betting parlor raided by the gendarmes.  But it’s all part of Joe’s ingenious plan to bring Fender and Company down, putting an end to their no-goodness.

Arson, Inc. (1949) is really little more than an extended Crime Does Not Pay short (the only difference is that the M-G-M series were typically two-reelers…Arson is a six-reeler).  It begins in semi-documentary style, with an officious-sounding fire chief (William Forrest) admonishing the viewing audience that they need to be more vigilant in fire prevention (thanks for the lecture, Smokey the Bear) …but that the fire department, too, is doing all they can by keeping an eye out for those firefighters who demonstrate that they are S-M-R-T and worthy of being promoted to the upper ranks.  Fire Chief is just about to tell us the tale of one such fireman (in other words, the entire plot of Arson, Inc.) when he’s interrupted by a knock on the door, and our hero Martin enters…thus bringing the documentary to an end and allowing the picture to commence.  (I would have given my eyeteeth to hear Forrest yell “Can’t you see I’m trying to narrate in here?”)

Arson, Inc. may be in black-and-white and it may be a crime picture…but as has often been noted on the blog, that does not make it film noir.  But this did not discourage VCI from slapping these onto collections and labeling them as such…and truth be told, I kind of enjoyed Arson.  It’s three minutes longer than Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951) …and still manages to be a more entertaining movie.  Arson was directed by B-Western veteran William A. Berke (he rode herd on a lot of Charles Starrett-Russell “Lucky” Hayden oaters at Columbia), who also helmed a VCI “Forgotten Noir” entry that I’m going to be skipping over because I already covered it back in May of 2012—1947’s Shoot to Kill.  (I’ll probably watch it again just to see if this print is better than the public domain one featured on the Mill Creek collection Dark Crimes.)

So why did I enjoy Arson, Inc.?  Sure, the plot is a little absurd (screenplay by Maurice Tombragel from an Arthur Caesar story) and runs out of steam before the hour is out (they have to institute some embarrassing shortcuts, including killing two people off in a high-speed car crash), but this Robert L. Lippert production does have an impressive cast…and I mean impressive in the sense of “Hey…that’s (fill in the blank)!”  Douglas Fowley, before he grew a set of whiskers and took out his false teeth to play scads of old codgers on episodic TV (including the grandfather on Pistols ‘n’ Petticoats), wasn’t too shabby in the villainy department…though he mostly played henchmen, so it’s nice to see him get a promotion here.  There’s a scene in Arson where Fowley, upset that a scheduled inferno did not go as planned, steps out of his office and slaps his secretary Betty across the face, thinking she spilled her guts to the cops.  (She didn’t, by the way, and while I’m not a lawyer I believe she has the makings of a solid sexual harassment case.)

The secretary is played by Marcia Mae Jones, a former child actress who won my heart when she portrayed Shirley Temple’s tormentor in The Little Princess (1939).  Jones was one of the rare kiddie thesps who became better actors (and in Marcia Mae’s case, sexier) as they matured, and I loved every minute she was onscreen in this one.  She gets pouty whenever Anne Gwynne’s character is around (she sees Jane as a potential rival for Fender’s affections…and I won’t beat around the bush—Mr. Fender starts to like Jane…a lot), and has a funny scene where she pretends to be drunk during a night on the town with Lowery, Gwynne, and Brophy.  (She can do much better than Fowley’s Fender…but sadly, she does not.)

Ed Brophy is always great in comic relief roles…but he gets to add a little menace in his portrayal of Purdy, a slightly disturbed guy with an obsession for setting things on fire.  Maudie Eburne is also on hand as Jane’s grandmother (she and Gwynne’s character trade off on babysitting jobs, resulting in a funny punchline in a scene involving Fender), and the cast is further stocked with favorites like Byron Foulger, Lelah Tyler, Matt McHugh, Emmett Vogan, Charles Williams, and our old friend Thurl Ravenscroft (who performs There’s a Tavern in the Town and Little Brown Jug in a party sequence).  If the voice calling the horse race in the betting parlor sequences sounds familiar…it’s bachelor father John Forsythe.

Anne Gwynne, last seen on the blog in Murder in the Blue Room (1944), left Universal after one of her better-known pictures, House of Frankenstein (1944); she then freelanced at other studios (she was Tess Trueheart in 1947’s Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome) but never achieved the same level of stardom that she had enjoyed at Universal.  (She spent the rest of her career doing some early TV and lots of commercials.)  Anne was a most attractive actress (a popular “pin-up girl” among GI’s in WW2) but she doesn’t get much to do here…though in her defense, my attention was directed mostly toward Marcia Mae.  (Sorry, Anne…maybe I’ll drag out Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe [1940] to watch again one of these days.)

The star of Arson, Inc. is Robert Lowery, an actor who…well, here’s the intriguing thing: I’ve seen a lot of movies in which he appeared (he’s kind of unavoidable in serials like The Monster and the Ape and The Mystery of the Riverboat)—and yet I don’t care for him at all.  Honest to my grandma, this is what they write about Bob in his biography, one of Arson, Inc.’s DVD extras: “As he matured into middle age, he acquired a startling resemblance to Clark Gable.”  (Only if you encountered him in a darkened room.)  However, I will recommend two of Bob’s movie gigs: one is The Mummy’s Ghost (1944), because you can chuckle to yourself as to why the then 30-year-old Lowery is still a college student.  The other is the 1949 serial version of Batman and Robin…because whatever his shortcomings are as the Caped Crusader, he’s actually pretty good as Bruce Wayne—playing the Gotham City gazillionaire exactly as he should be portrayed: as a callous, bored playboy.

Oh, and Lowery gets props for a brief scene in Arson, Inc. in which he strolls past a movie theater advertising Highway 13 (1948) and I Shot Jesse James (1949); not only is it shameless self-promotion on behalf of the Lippert people, but Lowery stars in Highway (a picture directed by Arson’s William Berke).

This review turned out longer than I planned…so I should wrap this up with a correction of a mistake I made in earlier Lippert reviews from friend of the blog Richard M. Roberts.  Apparently the production companies I mentioned like “Spartan Productions” and “Encore Productions” were fictitious entities, based out of the Lippert studios in an effort to “spread out the financial responsibility on those pictures.”  Richard observes: “Lippert was a king of creative bookkeeping and low budget production.”  And he’s not just whistling Dixie, because Arson, Inc. opens with this impressive (fictitious) studio logo:

I’m starting to get a better idea of why George Raft saw his 25% of Loan Shark’s profits go south.  Have a great weekend, cartooners.

Lost and Found

In June of 2016, the Library of Congress held its annual “Mostly Lost” workshop—now currently in its fifth successful year.  It’s an event that invites—according to one of the hardest-working individuals in the film preservation bidness, Ben Model— “writers, scholars, archivists, and filmmakers to just plain film buffs and students interested in film or preservation” to attend a three-day workshop in an effort to try and identify movies that, while preserved by film archives, often are missing their main titles—leaving a good many people in the dark.  (Little movie humor there…the management expresses its regrets.)   Participation in this “detective work” is encouraged at showings at the LOC’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, VA—audience members are encouraged to “talk to the screen” by shouting out the names of actors they recognize…city landmarks…models of automobiles (this would be right up my father’s alley, by the way) …anything that might help identify unknown films.  Musical accompaniment for these movie mysteries comes courtesy of Ben and two other names renowned for their contributions to silent film, Philip Carli and Andrew J. Simpson.

Ben, Phil, and Andrew provide new piano scores for the silent films showcased on Found at “Mostly Lost”—a 2016 DVD collection (from Undercrank Productions) of short films from the LOC vaults that were featured at the “Mostly Lost” get-togethers from 2012-2014.  There are a pair of sound shorts on this disc; the most intriguing contribution—which would be of great interest to my ClassicFlix colleague and proprietor of Cultureshark, Rick Brooks—is a 1927 one-reeler, Ventriloquist.  Why, I hear you ask?  Because it’s a filmed record of William Frawley—The Man Who Would Be Fred Mertz—performing his vaudeville act along with partner (and then-wife) Edna Frawley.  An effort from Lee De Forest’s Photofilm company (which produced experimental “talking shorts” featuring notables like President Calvin Coolidge and Charles Lindbergh), Ventriloquist gives us a look at a young Frawley playing a medicinal pill pitchman years and years before his prolific movie career and stints on TV’s I Love Lucy and My Three Sons.  More funny peculiar than funny ha-ha, Ventriloquist at least benefits from being better (also shorter) than the other talkie effort on Found, The Joyride (1928), which features the comedic stylings of the team of George LeMaire and Joe Phillips.  LeMaire and Phillips function as the homeless man’s Abbott & Costello; most of the punchlines to their jokes are obliterated by glitches in the film (and the ones you can hear aren’t particularly strong, either) and it’s not too difficult to delineate why the team didn’t take off in motion pictures (though the [always reliable] IMDb has a number of writing and directing credits for straight man LeMaire).

The most successful shorts on Found are of a comedic nature…though the dramatic one-reelers do have a little novelty value.  The best of these is Fidelity, a 1911 Pathé melodrama starring Gertrude Norman as a woman who, in the course of ten minutes, loses her daughter in an apartment fire…and then is threatened with eviction by the landlord because she’s behind in her arrears.  To raise the needed rent money, she sells the beloved family St. Bernard to a woman for her son…but by the time the one-reeler comes to a close, the mutt has rejoined her (thus the title of the film).  What a canine!  A Brass Button (1911) is the other one-reel drama (from Reliance), whose plot centers on a missing necklace and a wife who thinks her husband is responsible (he’s doing poorly in the stock market).  (SPOILER WARNING: a maid is revealed as the culprit.  Good help is so hard to find.)

Of the comedies on Found at “Mostly Lost,” The Nickel Snatcher (1920) is a lot of fun; it’s one-half of a two-reel Arrow comedy (directed by Charles Parrott—you know him as Charley Chase—who even back then was adding his “signature” [a la Hitchcock] to his efforts by appearing in a cameo as a member of a robber gang) that stars Hank Mann (you remember him as Charlie Chaplin’s boxing opponent in City Lights) and Vernon Dent, long before he menaced the Three Stooges.  While it’s a shame we only have one-half of this corker, it’s not difficult to follow (minimal plot involving the antics of a horse-drawn trolley) and features not only funny gags/characterizations but bathing beauties (quel easy on the eyes!).  In and Out (1921), with Monty Banks, is also quite funny; Monty’s a newly-married man who keeps being mistaken for a pesky book salesman, and the ice man has been asked by Mrs. Monty (Florence Gilbert) to throw him out of the house.  (Toward the end of this short, there’s a brief insert of a title card for a Poodles Hanneford comedy, which I found interesting; slowing down the DVD player reveals it to be the opening titles for a Weiss Brothers-Artclass short, Hit the Hay.)

George Ovey stars in Jerry’s Perfect Day (1916), one of his “Merry Jerry” Cub Comedies—another entry missing some footage (it's a two-reel comedy).  Michael Barrett at Pop Matters observes that most of the comedy shorts on Found share a common theme: “the number one pastime in them is avoiding the police.”  That’s probably because running away from cops was funny back then (not so much now, if you catch the cable news shows on a regular basis), and Perfect Day makes good use of this “cop avoidance” in a chuckle worthy sequence where Jerry and his fellow hoboes make off with police uniforms while the Men in Blue are having a dip in a pond during a picnic.  One of the tramps in Jerry’s midst is a “nance” character who might be of interest to those who study queer cinema.

The Paperhangers Revenge (1918) has no police; what it does have is a group of the titular workers striking for better wages and working conditions, and as such the team of Bud Duncan and Kewpie Morgan (as one IMDb commenter noted, “Ham and Bud Without the Ham”) is assigned the task of redecorating a house.  Surprisingly, they excel at the task and embark on a successful career as decorators.  I’m kidding, of course; they make a proper mess of things much to the consternation of house cook Dot Farley (Edgar Kennedy’s mother-in-law in his R-K-O two-reel comedies).  I wasn’t particularly taken with this short, but that might have a lot to do with the fact that I don’t find Duncan funny, particularly in this ersatz Ham and Bud effort (I dearly love Lloyd Hamilton—but those shorts he did with Bud are a chore to sit through; I think it was Steve Massa who described those comedies as “[their] only distinguishing characteristic was that one was a big scuzzy bum and the other a little scuzzy bum”).  The only short featuring Bud Duncan that even remotely amused me was Casper’s Week End (1928)—one of the “Toots and Casper” shorts produced by Larry Darmour (and based on the Jimmy Murphy comic strip).  Film historian Richard M. Roberts notes that Paperhangers is actually Poor Rich Cleaners (1918), and he’s got a print of this short (with the original titles) to back this up…so I’m going with RMR on this one.  (Besides, a title card in the short contains this bit of dialogue: “ANYTHING! If’ll [sic] you’ll clean up these two Poor Rich Cleaners!”)

The remaining comedy shorts are Grief (1921), an oddity with Jimmie Adams (it’s almost as if the material in this one comes from two separate comedies), and Fifteen Minutes (1921), with ‘Snub’ Pollard.  Fifteen is the crown jewel on Found at “Mostly Lost”; this one-reeler (from Hal Roach’s “Lot of Fun”) moves at a breakneck pace—with oodles of hilarious slapstick bits (I love the gag where ‘Snub” does a backflip off a tandem bike)—as once again, the importance of not interacting with the gendarmes is hysterically enforced.  The IMDb says Charley Chase directed this one as well…the “Mostly Lost” folks credit William Watson.  The final bit of footage on this DVD is another bit of novelty: test footage from the 1940 Hal Roach production One Million B.C. (1940).

I love silent comedy—you probably know that by now—and I get no greater thrill when DVDs stuffed with unseen treasures from that era are made available for a larger audience to experience and enjoy.  If you think along similar lines, a purchase of Found at “Mostly Lost” will not disappoint.