Mark Sandrich Presents. . . The Darkest Of Comedy Teams

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.

Happy Boxing Day 2022

It's December 26, Boxing Day! My favorite way to celebrate both Premier League Soccer and HAPPY FISTICUFFS DAY is with classic comedy. Chaplin the reluctant pugilist in CITY LIGHTS works for me!



How do we follow Chaplin? With the great movie comedy teams of yore, beginning with Laurel & Hardy in ANY OLD PORT (1932).

What Boxing Day entertainment can equal Laurel & Hardy? Our pals, The Three Stooges, who actually get story credit on the following, their second Columbia 2-reeler, PUNCH DRUNKS (1934).

PUNCH DRUNKS emphatically illustrates what Stooge-o-philes have long suspected, that Curly Howard's prodigious comedy talent was held substantially in check by how he, Moe and Larry were subservient as Ted Healy's Stooges. The break with Healy, who is terrific in such feature films as SAN FRANCISCO and HOLLYWOOD HOTEL, worked out well for all concerned.

For some reason, spending Boxing Day with The Three Stooges brings to mind Warner Brothers cartoons. Turns out there were actually Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies featuring boxing matches very early on, long before the Termite Terrace days.

There, in the screen credits of this 1932 Looney Tune, is the guy who worked on more WB cartoons than anybody, Friz Freleng.

The following Merrie Melodie, COUNT ME OUT, is a tie with BARS & STRIPES FOREVER as the best cartoon made by the directing duo of Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and Cal Dalton.

For some reason, this blogger finds the ever-cheerful yet unbelievably clueless Egghead, distinguished by his "Joe Penner" voice, to be weirdly endearing.

Not to be outdone, Chuck Jones took on Marquis Of Queensberry rules and brought Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd into the ring in TO DUCK OR NOT TO DUCK.



Never to be outdone, a few years later Chuck Jones and crew produced the boxing cartoon to end all boxing cartoons - Bugs Bunny in RABBIT PUNCH, a perennial favorite of this blog.

At Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, every year, the ceremonial December 26 blog entry shall feature the 1929 Fox comedy short subject Waltzing Around.



Waltzing Around stars the darkest, zaniest and most unpredictable of all movie comedy teams, Bobby Clark & Paul McCullough.



It's among only two existing examples of the team's 1928-1929 series for Fox.



All conventions involving boxing sequences in comedy films are turned upside-down, and the results are hilarious.



Paul McCullough has much more to do in Waltzing Around than he does in the team's subsequent RKO series, and, not surprisingly, he is very funny!




We sincerely hope more of Clark & McCullough's 1928-1929 Fox comedies turn up.



Happy Boxing Day!

Happy Boxing Day!

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.

My Favorite Psychotronic Iconoclastic Comedy Team from the pre-Code Era

"Ultimately, the team's output for RKO is a mixed bag that seems to be something of a Rorschach test for classic comedy fans." Aaron Neathery, film historian

Tied with The Brothers Marx, Bert Wheeler & Robert Woolsey and such fast-talking dames as Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell as my pre-Code movie favorites, the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough make me laugh out loud, for reasons - to paraphrase Pete Townshend and The Who - I can't explain.




Their comic style  is, to say the least, aggressively un-cuddly and as anarchic as Olsen & Johnson, The Marx Bros. and The Three Stooges.

And I repeat, Clark & McCullough are not cute in any way, shape or form.



Even now, in 21st century, the most diehard classic film buffs and comedy geeks will either be in utter hysterics or register blank, uncomprehending stares at the team's stark raving mad antics.



Bobby Clark (1888-1960) and Paul McCullough (1883-1936) started their showbiz career as teenagers. Their hard knocks-filled path culminated in starring on Broadway in The Ramblers and George Gershwin's Strike Up The Band.





As production of early talkies proved quite the opportunity for vaudeville and Broadway acts, the team was signed by Fox to appear in two-reel comedies and featurettes, starting in 1928.







Only two entries from Clark and McCullough's Fox series, The Belle Of Samoa and Waltzing Around, still exist.



The former, in this 21st century world now available via YouTube, is a fascinating 1920's vaudeville time capsule.



The latter exists in 16mm home movie prints and, from the accounts and reviews of those who have seen it, gives Paul McCullough is much more of a focal role than he would in the team's later films.





Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough subsequently starred in 21 comedy shorts for RKO Radio Pictures in 1931-1935. I personally find the RKO Radio Pictures comedies of Clark & McCullough hilarious, much in the take-no-prisoners spirit of the pre-MGM Marx Brothers.



In particular, I like their 1934 opus, Odor In The Court.







Several of the funniest entries in the team's RKO series were directed by Mark Sandrich, who later was at the helm for a wildly successful series of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals.



Clark & McCullough have been in the "lesser known movie comedy teams" category for one principal reason, besides the fact that they never starred in a feature film: Paul McCullough's suicide in 1936.



Even jaded, diehard 1930's movie comedy buffs watch their films and ask "why doesn't Paul have more to do?" and "isn't Bobby running roughshod over Paul?"



Unfortunately, the answer is often yes - and the chemistry between the boys onscreen appears uneasy at best. It is said that he is more of an equal partner in their early films for Fox than in the later RKO series, where Paul frequently has little to do other than be Bobby's straight man.



After his partner's death, Bobby Clark retired briefly before returning to the stage and pursuing a successful career as a solo comedian.


Bobby only once appeared in a movie again, in The Goldwyn Follies.



While these aren’t the easiest films in the world to see, there are DVDs of Clark & McCullough comedies available from A-1 Video, as well as Encore Entertainment and Looser Than Loose.



Am I thankful for DIY classic film preservationists and historians who have kept Clark & McCullough's onscreen legacy alive. YES!