The Soilers

Soilers, The (1932)

** (out of 4)

Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd play friends who are trying to work their way through college by selling magazines from door to door. The wives at home don't want any so the girls decide to go to city hall and sell them to the men using a little leg to get the job done. This is a surprisingly lazy short that has one bad joke that keeps getting repeated over and over to the point where you really start to wonder if perhaps there was some sort of writer's strike going on that prevented anything else from being written. The joke starts off with the girls trying to sell to women but they simply close the door in their faces. We then go to city hall where the girls get into one mess after another and most of them revolve around a Judge who just happens to have received some death threats, which has his bodyguard on the look out for the girls. Once again Zasu and Thelma go busting in and out of offices with Thelma playing the sexy vamp and trying to get buyers from her legs. Then we get scenes of Zasu trying to do the same thing. Usually Zasu is right on the money but sadly that's not the case here as she seems bored with the material and you really can't blame her. She doesn't bring any of that zany energy and even worse is that she just sleeps through the part. Even Todd seems bored and not willing to put too much energy into it. THE SOILERS has one lame joke that goes on and on for 20-minutes so this here is certainly for fans of the series only.

Having no luck selling magazine subscriptions to housewives door to door, the girls (Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts) decide to invade City Hall to try their luck selling to the men. Thelma is soon using "a little personality", as she puts it, to sell subscriptions - showing off her leg to get them into offices.

This film is mildly funny, not one of their best shorts, but still worth seeing. It features a number of standard slapstick gags including slips on banana peels, office ink spills, and the old "can't get through the revolving door" gag. The short is boosted up by the use of lively stock Roach Studio background music throughout the film and a ton of chemistry between Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts, who really seem to be having fun with this. They actually seem to spend the majority of this short falling down on top of a variety of male characters with their legs flailing about in the air - for those interested in seeing lots of shots of Thelma Todd's legs, this would be the short to see. A bit of slapstick fun.

"Do You Inhale?" Asks the back cover of "Home Passion" magazine in Zasu's hand.

"You don't? Oh dear. . ." Zasu is surprisingly aggressive throughout this, strattling every man in the cast during overlong, strangely indulgent boughts of mass clumsiness. These take place periodically, and strike me as if from some foreign style of theater or mumenschauns moment. Or do they just enjoy sitting on men? OOPS!

"Oh, Dear..." At one point the narrative stops and Thelma shows the audience how to roll a joint.

Thelma keeps her clothes on, but is still a vixen. The film lives up to its title when Thelma and Zasu cover a judge's chambers with glue and ink.

"It's glue alright..." Climax in the courtroom as Zasu somehow gets a gentleman's head caught between her legs.

The epic revolving door sequence is recapitulated in the last shot of Thelma, Zasu and James Morton spinning together on an office chair.

Derisive and subversive toward authority, film narrative, and norms of all types. FIVE STARS.

This is a terrible comedy short--mostly because it isn't particularly funny. I am strange in that I actually prefer my comedies to provide at least one or two laughs--but bear with me. This film features Thelma and Zasu (probably Hal Roach Studios LEAST talented comedy team) as solicitors trying to get people to buy magazine subscriptions. The timing and pacing of the film are just awful and employ the "more is DEFINITELY better" school of comedy. Instead of them tripping or getting stuck in a revolving door once or twice, it happens ad nausea. The same can be said for their knocking down the poor judge or his body guard. It wasn't all that funny the first time, but by the tenth time, I was feeling hostile!!! My advice is avoid the Pitts/Todd shorts--none of them I have seen are that funny, and besides, Roach was producing Laurel and Hardy as well as Charley Chase and Our Gang. See any of these series' shorts instead!!!

I have no idea why Zasu 'n' Thelma are listed as "cameos" -- they're the stars of the film! This was their 12th short subject together, released shortly after ALUM AND EVE in late 1932. They're door-to-door salesgirls who are unsuccessful selling to housewives, so they head downtown to sell to their husbands. Inside City Hall, they have several run-ins with a cranky judge and his bodyguard (frequent Three Stooges foils James Morton and Bud Jameson) and Charley Hall. A mediocre entry in the series, but there's some pretty good slapstick, particularly when Zasu (pronounced "ZAY-SOO"; most folks pronounce it incorrectly these days) gets tangled up in a ladder.