Hill-Tillies

Hill-Tillies (1936)

* (out of 4)

The second of two films Patsy Kelly made with Lyda Roberti after the death of her original partner Thelma Todd. In the film the girls are having a rough time finding a job so they decide to come up with a publicity stunt where they go into the woods for ten days without any supplies. Is HILL-TILLIES worth seeing? Only if you want to see if it's worse than the duo's previous film AT SEA ASHORE. It's rather amazing to see how incredibly bad both movies were but if someone held a gun to my head and I was forced to watch one of them again I guess this here was the better of the two. This is mainly do to a skit towards the end of the film where the girl's run into a wild man who has apparently been living in the woods for years and has several imaginary horses. This brief scene gives us a quick laugh and it's pretty much the only reason to see this thing, although hero Jim Thorpe appears briefly here. The rest of the film is one bad joke after another and it's easy to see why this was the final short for Kelly and Roberti. They simply don't have a bit of chemistry but I don't blame them or the studio too much considering they were simply testing the waters trying to come up with a new team. The film is beyond bad as it doesn't contain a single thing that works for it.

Gulp. This is probably the part where I begin to take a beating, boys and girls. This is where you start to get antsy, and may even start to get threatened by me! This is the part where you pick up those clubs and those torches and start to tar and feather me!

But before you reach for that pitchfork, O disgruntled fellow film zealot, I beg you to refrain from sending me to the infirmary for at least the time being, and let's instead concentrate on reviewing this short, or should I say, this poor little angel that never did anybody any harm, that peculiarly ends so abruptly, and some might even say awkwardly.

What can I say about the series ender? All you other film reviewers tend to put it so beautifully already that it's superfluous of me to make an endeavor of it myself, no matter how well-intentioned it may be.

But I'll try anyway, as if I've done many, many times before, and as usual, I can't wait to get my hands on it!!! (wink, wink)

The All-American all-star quarterback Jim Thorpe is hilarious playing an Indian, and he was, in fact, a Native American in real life. I believe he came from the Cherokee Nation, a proud and illustrious people. One of the greatest to ever toss the pigskin is here to provide some humor, alongside a slew of talented and memorable characters that includes Toby Wing, Harry Baker, and such. Dave Sharpe plays hide and seek as one of the reporters in on the scoop of this hillbilly mini-adventure. If you don't blink, you can find him hanging around the other newspaper people with their cute little pads and pencils.

The girls bet they can rough it out in the jungle for ten days, and in that space of time, they come across Thorpe, a grinning panther (with violent white eyes), and all the irregular sounds of nature. Nature in the raw? Don't I wish it were, but it DOES contain a few extremely precious moments in it that I just adore, even though it doesn't end it the way I would have, with Cornbread Jones showing us just how romantic he can get with a lady in his arms.

Prancing around like a pair of hillbilly sprites or countrified wood nymphs, they gleefully go on yet another merry adventure, which ended up being Miss Kelly's and Miss Roberti's last two-reeler together.

I regret it all ends this way, and that Cornbread wasn't there at the end of the short to give our fair maiden a kiss upon her honey-sweet brow. Couldn't they wait around for ol' Cornbread for the cameras to start rolling?! I guess not... Ah, well... I give it a ten, though you think I'm probably a yoo-hoo for doing so.

To get fame through publicity, and thereafter a job, Patsy Kelly and Lyda Roberti decide to pretend to g into the woods to live rough for a while. The place turns out to be as busy as Grand Central Station.

Hal Roach was getting ready to shut down production of shorts, but he still owed some GIRL FRIENDS on his contract. With Thelma Todd dea,d he cast Lyda Roberti as a dumb blonde. Unhappily, there's no sense of character beyond that.

With Toby Wing and Jim Thorpe -- yes, that Jim Thorpe.

Among the worst shorts that the Hal Roach Studio produced were the Thelma Todd/Zasu Pitts films. They made quite a few but they just weren't particularly funny. Zasu's shtick was sounding like Olive Oyl with adenoids and eventually they decided to replace her with the loud and abrasive Patsy Kelly. This really wasn't much of an improvement and the series limped along. However, oddly, after the suspicious death of Thelma Todd, the brilliant minds at Roach decided to keep the series going by substituting the Polish actress Lyda Roberti in Todd's place--a very bizarre decision in hindsight. Why pick Roberti other than the fact that she, too, was a blonde?! With her heavy accent and lack of screen presence or talent, the series limped along...barely...until Roberti's very premature death.

Lyda and Patsy (and their friend--who just disappeared from the film after the initial scene and returns at the very end) are looking for a job without any success. So, as a publicity stunt, they move into the forest to live off the land 'Tarzan style'. There the ladies encounter American-Indians and a crazy man--none of which is the least bit funny. In fact, I have seen films of dental extractions that are funnier! Dreadful and incredibly bad chemistry--with Patsy playing a loud-mouth no-talent and Lyda playing a dumb lady who had 8 minutes of English lessons!

Wanna see a sample of how bad this film is? How about this wonderful dialog:

Indian #1: "How"

Indian #2: "How"

Lyda: "I'm fine, thanks!"

By the way, the big American Indian was played by the world-famous athlete, Jim Thorpe. It's sad to see the man reduced to playing stereotypical parts in crap films like this after his amazing performance in the Olympics a couple decades earlier.