The Man's Angle

Man's Angle, The (1942)

** (out of 4)

At the end of Robert Benchley's THE TROUBLE WITH HUSBANDS he promises that he'll take a look at the other side and that's exactly what this short does. Benchley, once again at his desk, tells how Mr. Doakes (Benchley) is annoyed by certain things his wife does. Examples include her messing up his Sunday newspaper, her going hat shopping with him and how she asks him to tell a joke only to keep cutting him off with her version of it. By watching this Paramount short I'm guessing the filmmakers felt that mostly women would be watching it because there are at least three different times when Benchley tells people that they're not meaning all women, just a select number. It seems like before every joke we have to hear a warning on how this isn't meant to imply to all women. When the men are taking the beating you never see these warning but if it seems like I'm going on about something that's not important then you're wrong. This is actually important because it effects the jokes being told because it seems as if they didn't want to spoof women too much so instead they just took simple things and made them a lot more annoying than any woman would probably act. Just take a look at the way the wife handles the newspaper as an example. We're made to believe that a wife takes pride in a clean home yet she does this to the newspaper? The scene with the joke isn't any funnier because of how overboard they go with it.

This is an amusing follow-up to a previous Robert Benchley feature, "The Trouble With Husbands", filmed two years earlier. In the earlier feature, he played a lecturer on domestic difficulties as well as a husband whose behavior illustrated some of the common domestic faults of males. Here, the same format is used to present "The Man's Angle".

Benchley again is both the lecturer and the male half of the couple whose experiences serve as illustrations of the foibles of a 'typical' wife. Besides the sketches, there is an added gag, as the lecturer continually stresses that these female traits are merely isolated examples that he has heard of, rather than general characteristics, with this then being used in the finale.

In both of these features, the sketches satirize behavior that is entirely familiar, but the good timing makes it more amusing than it may have been on its own. And again, although in many respects the depictions border on stereotypes of the two genders, it is presented in Benchley's good-natured, low-key way, which keeps it from being harsh. It's a good job of creating humor out of situations that can cause unfortunate tensions, and out of material that can be belittling if approached in the wrong fashion.

Of the two features, no doubt many viewers will find one of them funnier than the other, but after all that's part of the point to them. And in fact, both of them poke some gentle fun at both men and women, just in differing doses each time.