Before the great and prolific Mark Sandrich (October 26, 1900 - March 4, 1945) became the premier director of classic 1930's movie musicals, including several boffo Astaire & Rogers flicks (The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, Follow The Fleet, Shall We Dance, Carefree), he was responsible for making fast and very funny 2-reel comedies for RKO. Several short subjects Sandrich directed starred the aggressively zany, randy and exceedingly pre-Code comedy team of Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.
Clark & McCullough emphatically give the bird to the world as they pose as various professions, always under false pretenses, in these RKO comedies. Jitters The Butler co-stars the always dignified Robert Grieg (a memorable co-star in the Marx Brothers' 1930 film of ANIMAL CRACKERS) as the funniest - and the most enthusiastically masochistic - of professional manservants.
The Iceman's Ball features a rather amazing cast of 2-reel comedy royalty, including Billy Franey, Laurel & Hardy nemesis Jimmie Finlayson, 3 Stooges arch-nemesis Vernon Dent and perennial cop Fred Kelsey. All the players make sure that the essential premise - the always brazen Clark & McCullough masquerade as cops to pick up girls and crash all the local parties - is also a riot.
In The Druggist's Dilemma, Clark & McCullough co-star with both Jimmie Finlayson and the marvelous comedienne and character actress Cecil Cunningham.
Prior to his smashing success as RKO musicals king, Mark Sandrich successfully delivered both key elements of Clark & McCullough's humor, the ultra-zany and that sense of the dark and disturbing, to the silver screen.
C & McC possess a dark sensibility well beyond even that of the early 1930's Marx Brothers, who also gave the world the bird. . . at least until they ended up at MGM.
There is always an palpable uneasiness intertwined with C&McC's distinctive comic anarchy, and not just due to the troubled Paul McCullough's suicide in March 1936.
After directing Bobby & Paul's go-for-broke wacky antics and musical short subjects featuring bandleader Phil Harris (pre-Jack Benny) but before helming Fred & Ginger musicals, Mr. Sandrich made very funny films with a goofier (and substantially less dark) comedy team, Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey.
These include two of our all-time favorite classic comedies, Cockeyed Cavaliers and Hips Hips Hooray.
Love the talented Mark Sandrich's W&W features for the same reasons I love the aforementioned Clark & McCullough comedies and the Marx Brothers at Paramount: that unique 1930-1934 blend of the unabashedly and unrepentantly wacky, the silly, the goofy, the outrageous and the risqué, all served simultaneously.
In closing, must extend big time thanks to the YouTube poster "Joseph Blough," who is responsible for the excellent Library Of Congress transfers of Jitters The Butler, The Iceman's Ball and The Druggist's Dilemma.
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