Believe It or Not (Second Series) #6

Believe It or Not (Second Series) #6 (1932)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Better than average entry has Ripley on a train where a small group gathers to hear his amazing stories. This time out we learn of an Indian in Alaska who carried a piano on his back. In Canada we see a wooden garden and in Arkansas we see chickens with no feathers but instead hair as well as another man who dug up several wooden figures out of the ground. We also get to see a few items from Ripley's visit to Africa and we finish things off with footage of a spider killing a much larger lizard. Ripley seems to enjoy the footage on display here as he's a lot more energetic than we normally see him. The stories this time out range from decent to good, which makes this one of the better entries since there aren't any real bad ones being told here. The highlight is probably the fur-covered chickens but why on Earth they included the spider stuff is beyond me but it's certainly a strange way to end the film.

Robert L. Ripley boards a train and proceeds to lecture the travelers on spiders, a woman with long eyelashes, and the Great Pyramid.

I was not enthralled. Riley's style of lecture is to drone his collection of facts with visual proofs, sometimes drawn, and sometimes photographed. The facts seem to be chosen at random, with no connection between them except for Ripley's assertion that they are unbelievable. The happenstance nature of the facts and Ripley's dull delivery interested me a lot less than contemporary audiences -- probably. Celebrities are always of interest, and the creator of the famous newspaper feature is not exempt from that.