Should Sailors Marry?

This is definitely a "lesser known" comedy short from the 1920s. The only reason I saw it was because it was on a DVD by Kino Films featuring non-Laurel and Hardy shorts featuring Ollie. They are interesting and historically important, but also generally average to below average for the style film. Compared to shorts by Chaplin, Keaton, Arbuckle and Lloyd, they are definitely a step below them in quality and humor. Also, the accompanying music was pretty poor by the standards of other silent DVDs. I ended up turning OFF the sound due to the inappropriateness of the music to set the proper mood. But, despite this, they are still worth seeing.

This was an agreeable short featuring Clyde Cook--a guy who superficially somewhat resembled Ben Turpin. It is odd, though, that this was included on this Oliver Hardy DVD considering Hardy is barely in this film at all.

Clyde is a sailor who is going to marry a woman he's corresponded with but has never met. Despite her description, she's a pretty ugly old dame and the only reason she wants to marry Clyde is so he can pay the back spousal support she owes her previous husband. Well, the first 2/3 of the film is cute, but I really liked it in the final segment where the wife and her ex- try to KILL Clyde to get the insurance money--it's really funny and is probably the best of the 8 shorts on the DVD.

In California in the early 1980s, I interviewed Clyde Cook (from "Brizzo", Down Under) near the end of his long life. He had a fascinating career, performing in American vaudeville as the Kangaroo Boy, and arriving in New York City just in time for the 1919 Actors' Equity strike. In his prime, Clyde Cook's acrobatic abilities were equal to those of the great Buster Keaton, Al St John and Lupino Lane. Unfortunately, most of Cook's starring vehicles -- low-budget shorts -- failed to make full use of his dazzling acrobatic talents. Even in the feature film 'He Who Gets Slapped', Cook has extensive screen time as a circus clown but he confines his acrobatics to a single hurdle/back-handspring/run-off that left me wanting to see more.

Cook's on-screen appearance was rather off-putting. He was a scrawny "gowk", resembling the later English comedian Nat Jackley (or a frailer version of the American comedian Gil Lamb). In his starring vehicles -- including 'Should Sailors Marry?' -- Cook typically wore a huge brush moustache that I consider unpleasant to look at because of its calculated asymmetry. When Cook isn't doing his acrobatics, it's difficult to see what he has to offer as a performer.

In 'Should Sailors Marry?', Cook plays off against burly Noah Young, a talented character actor who's better known for his second-banana work opposite Harold Lloyd and Snub Pollard. Young and Cook have one excellent scene here; in which Young's character -- a wrestler -- starts to sleepwalk, and thinks he's having a wrestling match. Amazingly, he manages to wrestle Cook without ever actually waking up. Cook's physical comedy here is excellent, but I kept waiting for him to cut loose with some truly first-rate acrobatics that never arrived.

Oliver Hardy (pre-Laurel) has one brief scene as an insurance medico, giving a fine performance in a role very different from his later "Ollie" character. Cook does a bit of dancing here, performing an eccentric step that has also been captured on film by Buster Keaton and Groucho Marx. I have very fond memories of Clyde Cook -- one of the very few male actors from the silent-film era whom I ever met -- so it pains me that I can't rate this short comedy any funnier than 4 out of 10.

This was my first exposure to the work of the silent comedian Clyde Cook. He has a striking bony face, big expressive eyes, and some very comical nervous mannerisms, and he handles all the comedy material given to him quite capably, but he doesn't really project much of a distinctive personality. I suspect he is one of those comedians who the silent era who is largely forgotten today because he was fairly forgettable.

This short is one of many from its era at the Hal Roach Studios that title writer H. M. Walker christened with names that were interrogative sentences. It joins "Should Married Men Go Home? "Is Marriage the Bunk?" "Should Husbands Be Watched?" and others. I don;t really know why this was such a pattern.

The short itself is a bit average but still a fun watch. The strange plot, which, funny on its own, is one of its strengths, has a woman marrying Cook for the money she thinks he has so she can use it to pay alimony to her wrestler ex-husband. That's Noah Young, threatening tough guy extraordinaire, who is as good a threatening tough guy as ever here. It leads to the best sequence, where the two end up accidentally in bed together, and annoy the hell out of each other.

Many of the other gags feel rather randomly tacked on, as does the late sequence where Clyde flies from girders in very imitative Harold Lloyd style. Enough work, though, that there are no significant segments dry of laughs. Oliver Hardy, before teaming with Stan Laurel, has a role as a crooked doctor instrumental in a good black comedy gag -- that Cook's wife wants to get him killed for the insurance money. He's good in what he gets, using some of "Ollie's" later fussy mannerisms to good effect as an overly-slick con man. The magnetic Martha Sleeper has a small but memorable part as Clyde's blasé new daughter.

Overall it is not the most memorable or artful of the comedies coming out of Roach Studios at the time, but it generates enough laughs to be worth a viewing.