Wandering Papas

Who was Clyde Cook? One of several hundreds of silent film comics, whose short subjects are now largely forgotten. A small man with a large mustache, he made dozens of comedies which are now forgotten by all but a few old film buffs. Mr. Cook, alas, never seemed to develop much of a character or style. He was simply one of several hundred comics who did silly things because they would make the audience laugh. You could watch him, but you probably wouldn't go searching out his movies, and so he faded into obscurity.

As for why you should watch this one, it is mostly interesting from a historical standpoint because it was directed by Stan Laurel and had Oliver Hardy in a major supporting role. It has a story and some moderately interesting situations.

There are some good gags here. Clyde is a cook for a railroad construction crew. He goes hunting and tries to catch fish using flypaper and succeeds in catching a skunk by the tail. He uses gunpowder instead of baking powder for flapjacks. There's also a thrill comedy sequence in which various people struggle along a railroad on a high trestle bridge. If it's not up to Harold Lloyd in SAFETY LAST, it is still a pleasant, painless comedy with a few laughs.

The gimmick in this film known alternatively as Wandering Papas and Enough To Do is that Stan Laurel directs the film that stars Australian comic Clyde Cook and also has Oliver Hardy playing a construction foreman.

Sad to say I saw a truly cut down version of the film only about 8 minutes of the original 20 and not enough to judge Enough To Do with any accuracy. Clyde Cook with his rubbery legs and walrus mustache did not register any personality with me.

Cook plays Cook in a railroad camp where the men are expecting a good meal because of a reputation Cook has. He actually has to catch the game he wishes to serve and most of the humor comes from that. Still in the end he disappoints those hungry men.

It seems that after the departure of its big star in Harold Lloyd, Hal Roach Studios looked to a number of comics for a replacement. One of them was the Australian former acrobatic clown Clyde Cook, who stars in this film. It's the second of his films that I have seen, and while presumably his acrobatic training has enabled him to be admirably up to the task of performing Lloyd-esquire stunts on screen, he doesn't project much of his own character. His skeletal face and expressive eyes make him look quite memorable, but he doesn't DO anything that makes an impression, and tends just to go through the paces of what's given him in a businesslike way.

This short lacks much of a coherent plot, and sees Cook playing a cook (possibly an intentional joke?) for a bunch of bridge-builders who have camped out near a hermit who's daughter has fallen in love. The hermit business seems there only to facilitate one brief gag in which Clyde thinks the daughter's kisses are for him, and they aren't.

In a film so formless one might expect a bevy of creative gags to make up for it, but here -- while a few of the gags are rather good (ie catching fish with flypaper) -- they are spaced out a bit and rarely milked. Stan Laurel is the director and I don't blame him for this so much as the writers who should have been responsible. In fact I give Laurel credit for a very nicely handled thrill-stunt sequence at the end with a dangling train. Most of the gags are of a pretty surreal, impossible nature, eschewing greater realism in comedy that Roach Studios became known for.

Oliver Hardy is in this as well, collaborating with future partner Stan Laurel though both are not on screen, and once again proves himself a subtler comic actor by orders of magnitude than anyone else around him. The sequence where he puppy-dog-looks Clyde into giving him more pancakes (which he tries to get back during grace) is the funniest in the movie and only work's because of Hardy's facial expressions.

There are a few good bits here making this decent viewing, but it's mostly a very forgettable short.

This short comedy was produced for the Hal Roach Studio at a time when Roach was trying to find a new star comic to replace the departed Harold Lloyd, who left his employ in 1923. Jimmy Finlayson, Glenn Tryon, and Tyler Brooke were each given a try-out but failed to make the grade as a leading player, although of course Finlayson later found his niche as a great foil to Laurel & Hardy. Wandering Papas was a vehicle for Australian comic Clyde Cook, a goofy little guy in baggy pants who looked like a cross between Finlayson and Ben Turpin.

Cook was a former stage clown, and I must confess that while watching him in this short I was reminded of the clowns at Ringling Brothers shows, the ones who'd perform vigorous pratfalls, slop buckets of suds on each other, and chase each other around the ring, but without making me laugh -- past the age of 6, anyhow. You get the sense that what you're watching is supposed to be funny, but somehow it isn't, and I think it's because this sort of clown lacks an identifiable personality. He exists to be funny and for no other reason, thus, no matter how well executed, the comedy feels hollow.

Consider the early scene where Cook, who plays the chef at a railroad construction gang's camp, goes to a nearby lake to catch fish for supper. Cook dutifully performs his allotted gags (trying to catch a fish with flypaper, etc.) and executes some good falls, but somehow it doesn't register. Then he goes hunting for rabbit, but comedy-wise the results aren't any more effective. Compare the sequence to Buster Keaton's The Balloonatic, a short comedy released a couple of years before this one. When Buster goes fishing and hunting, it's funny. His gags are stronger, but the real difference is that Buster has a recognizably human persona and his behavior is dictated by the demands of his character. Clyde Cook, on the other hand, does whatever he or his gag writers thought might get a laugh. When he catches a skunk instead of a rabbit he doesn't know the difference (what is he, a moron?) and takes it back to camp with predictable results, but the whole routine feels lame. Cook, unlike Keaton, lacks personality.

Perhaps as insurance the folks who made this film cast Tyler Brooke in a supporting role. As noted above, Brooke was another up-and-coming comic that Hal Roach hoped to promote to stardom, but he isn't given much to do in Wandering Papas. (And by the way, if anyone has a theory concerning the meaning of the title I'd like to hear it). Brooke serves as love interest, romancing the daughter of a surly guy who lives near the construction site. In the end, the lovers elope and wind up on a runaway train with the angry father and our lead comic, Cook. The chase finale is nicely handled. The train rolls wildly along a mountain track and then derails in such a way that Cook and the angry father are dangling from a railroad car over a chasm. The sequence is well-edited and suspenseful, but it might have been something really special if we cared more about the fate of these characters; that's the difference between light entertainment and classic comedy.

Speaking of comedians with personality, there's one other supporting player of note: Oliver Hardy, who plays a construction worker. Hardy, who looks incredibly boyish here, has a good scene with Cook in the dining hall when he requests more flapjacks simply by giving the chef a series of eloquent looks. Within a year or so of appearing in this film, Hardy would begin making some of the last great comedies of the silent era in collaboration with the director of Wandering Papas, the one and only Stan Laurel.