Quiet Please!

Quiet Please! (1933)

** (out of 4)

Edgar Kennedy boards a train heading to a gun convention where he's looking to make a ton of sales. While on the train his mother-in-law and brother-in-law show up and start one major issue after another, which doesn't sit well with Kennedy's boss who is also on the train.

QUIET PLEASE! comes from writer-director George Stevens who at this early point in his career hadn't hit the high levels that were soon to follow. For the most part this is a fairly routine comedy where our hero gets punched in the face a few times as well as destroys the train through no fault of his own. This was just one of many films in the "Mr. Average Man" series that Kennedy did for RKO and while this one here isn't all that funny it's still got a few nice moments for fans of the comedian. HERO AND THE TERROR is a decent movie but not a complete winner.

It's Hal Roach alumni day in this excellent entry in Edgar Kennedy's long-running 'Average Man' series for RKO -- it ran from about 1933 until his death with a fine supporting cast of regulars including Florence Lake as his wife, Dot Farley as his horror of a mother-in-law and Jack Rice -- missing in this outing -- as his layabout brother-in-law.

In this one, ex-Roach director and cameraman George Stevens -- yes, that George Stevens -- directs and co-writes, along with fellow Roach alumnus Fred Guiol, and Bud Jamison and Fred Kelsey show up on the screen. Kelsey was so well known for playing comic cops that he showed up in a Tex Avery cartoon in the 1940s.

The net result is a short that shows the fine comic construction and execution of a Roach short of the period. If it comes your way, don't miss it.