Wife to Spare

Dick Wessell is being sued by Christine MacIntyre -- whose Georgia Peach accept keeps slipping -- for writing her passionate letters. Dick ropes brother-in-law Andy Clyde into getting the letters, but Andy finds himself being blackmailed.

Andy Clyde's series at Columbia had changed a bit. Always an expert at playing the henpecked worm that turns, he's supplied not only with Lucille Browne as a wife, but with Vera Lewis as an acid-tongued mother-in-law and Dick Wessell as a layabout brother-in-law. It's based on Edgar Kennedy's successful shorts series at RKO. The problem is the other series was built around Kennedy's slow burn, and Andy's strength in humor was the mild-mannered man who figures things out slowly. Add in the cheap and obvious sort of humor that director Edward Bernds was used to supervising for the Three Stooges, and you have an ill-fitting comedy.

Sometimes when I review a film, I would almost rather write "I agree with _______"....and that's the case with "Wife to Spare". Boblipton noticed that this film seemed an awful lot like the short films Edgar Kennedy was making about the same time...shorts where a husband is treated terribly by his wife and her family. The difference is that the Kennedy films were a bit funnier...whereas "Wife to Spare" has very, very few laughs.

When the story begins, you can see how emasculated Andy (Andy Clyde) is, as his wife and mother-in-law use him as a sewing dummy....all dressed in a frilly dress. In addition, the mother-in-law is simply hateful towards him...unleashing horrible comment after horrible comment. There also is the lazy brother-in-law who's moved in along with the mother-in-law and it's enough to drive anyone to homicide!

In the midst of all this, Andy learns that his brother-in-law is being blackmailed by a woman. So, being a nice guy, Andy tries to work things out...only to find he, too, is now being blackmailed by this same woman and her accomplice. Can Andy work his way out of this mess AND the mess with his in-laws?

The biggest problem with this short film is that it's a comedy but it has very few laughs. Additionally, as I mentioned above, it's not like this is an original idea--Edgar Kennedy made a ton of films in the 1930s just like it.