Kicking off Boxing Day, which doesn't actually refer to post-Christmas bargain-hunting shopping or fisticuffs but to Premier League soccer, the United Kingdom's national pastime will be the always iconoclastic and un-cuddly comedy team of Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.
While this 1929 opus actually features very little slapstick, Clark & McCullough being fast-talking verbal comics, the boxing sequence in Waltzing Around is hilarious.
The ill-fated Paul McCullough gets a lot more to do here than he does in the team's subsequent RKO Radio Pictures series, and he is quite funny.
This indicates that their 1928-1929 Fox comedies may be superior to the later RKO series. Enjoy this super rare Fox 3-reeler!
One of the great vaudeville, stage and radio comedians was Joe Cook (1890-1959), whose blend of acrobatics and tongue-twisting verbal humor remains unequalled. While Joe Cook appeared in Frank Capra's entertaining 1930 feature Rain Or Shine, a tale of life in the big top, the comic's cinematic legacy remains defined by a series of short subjects he starred in for Fox and Educational.
In the following, THE WHITE HOPE (1936), Joe co-stars with dialect comic and cartoon voice artist George "How Do You Like That???" Givot, who plays the most unlikely and unenthusiastic of pugilists.
Cook's 2-reelers for Educational, produced by Al Christie, are consistently very funny and original. Too bad Joe didn't make more movies!
Boxing Day wouldn't feel right without Harold Lloyd's pugilistic prowess in THE MILKY WAY, directed by Leo McCarey.
Greatest boxing film ever? Hands and gloves down, and taking nothing away from the incomparable Robert Wise film The Set-Up and the last Humphrey Bogart flick, The Harder They Fall, it's the outstanding Warner Bros. cartoon Rabbit Punch, directed by Chuck Jones!
Bugs Bunny, as usual, rules, as do Chuck, writer Mike Maltese, voice artist Mel Blanc, music man Carl Stalling, animators Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Lloyd Vaughan and Abe Levitow (who is also known as the guy who directed this writer's all-time favorite holiday season TV show, Mister Magoo’s Christmas Carol).
We close today's Boxing Day post and this blog's contributions for the year 2021 with a thanks a million to historian, classic movie expert and collector Ralph Celentano, for making several of the excellent comedy rarities seen here available on YouTube.
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