User Reviews

Stealing the suitcase of costumes being held by the landlady that piano player Thelma Todd needs, roommate Zasu Pitts ends up creating a scene in the vaudeville show that Thelma is playing in. She has issues with the landlady and the tenant who took over Thelma's room, but manages to escape and interrupts a murder scene in a sketch and then ends up as part of a tumbling act, tossed around and flipped over like a stack of pancakes. Zasu gets the bulk of the good material but the pretty Thelma is wasted. Billy Gilbert is on hand as a ham actor, adding a bit of needed humor. Otherwise, this one is just ok, nothing special from Hal Roach's shorts department.

Director George Marshall, like George Stevens and like Leo McCarey, worked for Hal Roach, and with Laurel & Hardy (as both director and actor - he is the malevolent army cook who ends up in the brig with them when they take his words too literally regarding taking the garbage to the General in PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES). His work was usually quite good and workmanlike, and his career would stretch into the 1960s - he did work for Lucille Ball on her second series THE LUCY SHOW. But nobody does good work all the time. You need to have good production values and script. Without these you will be sorely defeated, even if you have a good cast.

Here Marshall had a decent cast: Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts were Hal Roach's attempt to make a female Laurel & Hardy, which sometimes did work. He has Charlie Hall here too, though sadly wasted in a handful of shots showing frustration. Billy Gilbert and Bud Jamison give good accounts for themselves as well. But the whole film is made without care, and it requires care.

Thelma is the lead in a vaudeville dance number. She has just finally gotten a booking at the local theater, but Thelma owes her boarding house landlady (Charlotte Nemo) back rent, and the lady will not allow Thelma to get her property for the act until she is paid. Thelma asks Zasu, the put-upon maid in the boarding house, to get her bag of clothes. They are unaware that Nemo has just allowed her unsuccessful actor brother (Bud) to use the rooms that were Todd's for his own, while he looks for work. Of course, Zasu does get Todd's luggage, but she is caught doing so by her boss and Bud. So they bring a cop with them to repossess the property and arrest Zasu and Thelma at the theater.

Not knowing what she is doing, Zasu soon is lousing up all the vaudeville acts, beginning with interfering with a melodramatic play-let involving Billy Gilbert and Symona Boniface, and then an acrobatic act). But Zasu's antics are entertaining the audience. Then she gets involved, wearing a tutu costume, in Thelma's act, and ruins that too. But she manages to bring Bud into the act, and he is smart enough to see that the audience is enjoying his activities with Zasu.

This is the bald outline of the story - a bit more than I really thought I would tell, but about all that I could think of discussing. It might have worked better if the destruction of the various acts were consolidated (say Thelma had been in the scene with Gilbert), and then Bud Jamison had been brought in. There were too many moments of slapstick destruction - and it sort of gummed up the movie. The scenes of Zasu destroying the acts (such as Thelma's actual act, where she plays the piano and dances) were done too cheaply. The result is that this was a near miss for the Hal Roach players, particularly Todd and Pitts. It should have been far better than it was.