Poker Widows

Dance instructor Arthur Stone's wife, Gertrude Astor, is a jealous woman. Patsy O'Leary's husband, Wade Boteler, is a jealous man. Boteler goes out to play poker every night, so Miss O'Leary phones Stone for a private dance lesson at her apartment. When there's a knock at the door, Stone goes out the window and enters an apartment, where Boteler is playing poker.

Although Stone does some mugging, this Mack Sennett short isn't particularly amusing. I attribute this to director Leslie Pearce, who directed many of Sennett's shorts in this period, few of which I find particularly amusing. When they are, it's because he's directing W. C. Fields, which means that Fields was directing.

My expectations for "Poker Widows" was a bit low. After all, it was a Mack Sennett production and I usually have found the shorts he made in the 1930s to be amazingly unfunny. This film could have been quite funny given the story idea...but it just didn't seem to capitalize on the possibilities for laughs.

A man loves to play poker and his wife decides to have a guy come to their apartment when he's gone and give her dancing lessons. The problem is that the poker player and the dancer's wife both are the jealous sorts. So the wife follows the dancer...and he ducks out of the apartment when she arrives and climbs the fire escape to another apartment. He doesn't know that the woman's husband is among the guys playing poker there...and the dancer begins bragging about the sexy lady he was just with...but to make things worse, he shows a photo of it to the poker players...and the jealous husband is ready to kill him!

This is not a terrible comedy...but it certainly manages to extract the least amount of humor from the situation. Watchable but not much more.