Mixed Nuts

Mixed Nuts is a fun Hal Roach short from 1934 filled with funny jokes and beautiful chorus girls It was directed by James Parrot and stars Thelma Hill (a former Mack Sennett bathing beauty), Douglas Wakefield, Billy Nelson, and Nora Cecil.

The story begins with the government deciding it needs to do something about all the unemployed chorus girls. So they decide to spend $2 million to send the ladies to a finishing school. Unfortunately the schools owner Mrs. Twitchett is not happy about the girls being there. At the school they are taught self-defense and art but all of it is really just an excuse for a lot of funny gags. One of the highlights is watching lovely Thelma Hill dealing with ants in her dress! At the end there's a big dance number with the ladies wearing skimpy outfits (even Mrs. Twitchett gets in on the fun).

Mixed Nuts has a lot of laughs, great performances, and beautiful chorus girls.

Like many of the films from Hal Roach Studios, this one was directed by James Parrott--also known as Paul Parrott. Parrott was a comedian and starred in quite a few shorts. However, unlike his more famous brother (Charley Chase), after a while he stopped acting and concentrated on directing....whereas Charley continued to do both during his time at Roach.

"Mixed Nuts" is a single-idea comedy that really doesn't make the most of that idea. When the story begins, someone leaves $2,000,000 for the training of chorus girls to learn another life. The rest of the film is set at a finishing school where the lovely young ladies have matriculated. The problem is that most of what happens next isn't all that funny--the self-defense class, the sleepwalking bit, the art class as well as the lady with bugs in her clothing. Barely a laugh in any of these routines....and reason enough to skip this one.

This short is so full of jive, so full of sauce, and so full of go... and I do believe the word is GO here, baby...

What's up with the cast? Are you gonna make a series around these two English guys or aren't you? Billy Nelson and Douglas Wakefield have the saddest distinction of being the most forgotten of all comedy teams, and it's only because the work they DID do is totally unavailable. I mean, where's "Music In Your Hair" and shorts like those? Where's the rest of the All-Star series? There was also something Roach did with Irwin S. Cobb in the mid-30's. What happened to THOSE shorts? Where are they? Were they destroyed? Have they EVER seen the light of day? Are they stuck in a vault somewhere in Norway, perhaps? It would've been the studio's folly to delete them right after they appeared.

Anyway, this lively scoop of sweet heavy cream has the same opening theme to the Boy Friends' shorts, "Let's Go," and it was directed by James Parrott, who directed a great deal of Laurel and Hardy, Thelma Todd, and Our Gang shorts.

And instead of stressing education at this school, they swivel their hips and shake their fannies, and this is how they get ahead at this so-called "institution of learning." The only people I recognize here are Don Barclay and Nora Cecil.

Although it has the look and feel of a Vitaphone short, Mixed Nuts was made at the Hal Roach Studio, and the proof of that can be heard on the soundtrack: the familiar, zippy background music of Roy Shield places this comedy firmly on the Roach lot. But instead of Laurel & Hardy or Charley Chase, this two-reel short features an ensemble of lesser- known players, including several British comics who were appearing in supporting roles for Roach at this time. L&H buffs will recall Jack Barty's memorable turn as the crazed butler from Oliver the Eighth, while Don Barclay was best known for playing fussy, flustered Franklin Pangborn types. Here, each of the featured players is given a couple of scenes, a couple of quips and a gag or two, but no one player dominates the proceedings.

Oddly enough for a Roach comedy, the premise of Mixed Nuts is grounded in topical political satire aimed at the New Deal, although the satire is of a very lightweight (and light-hearted) nature. The film begins at a city council meeting where an unidentified politician announces that the government has released $50,000 for the relief of unemployed plumbers. This prompts applause, but also a pointed question from an angry woman who wants to know what the government is going to do for the members of her profession: chorus girls. The politician glibly replies that the administration has set aside money—two million dollars, no less!—for the re-education of chorus girls, "to fit them for the better things in life." Next thing you know we're at Mrs. Twitchett's Exclusive Finishing School for Girls, a once prestigious academy apparently fallen on hard times. Mrs. Twitchett (played by the under-appreciated Nora Cecil, dryly funny as usual) expresses her dismay as the first wave of chorines arrives to be, well, re-fitted. The rest of the film consists of a series of blackout gags concerning the young ladies' classroom experiences. Imagine an Our Gang schoolhouse comedy, only the students are all female, they're about 22 years old, they smoke and they're sassy: that's Mixed Nuts in a nutshell.

The quality of the humor in this short varies from amusing to silly to downright dumb, but the over all tone is so cheery, and the tempo is so brisk, there's just no point in being overly critical. My favorite scenes feature Dorothy Granger as a dame who packs a mean punch, and pert little Thelma Hill as the girl attacked by the entomology professor's Arabian Sand Fleas. Mixed Nuts is a cute comedy that is eager to please, and it made people laugh during the dark days of the Great Depression. It might even make people laugh now, when the subject of government bailouts is once again topical. I do have to wonder, though: how did those unemployed plumbers react when they found out that chorus girls got forty times as much money from the government than THEY got?