T-Bone Handicap

When Spark Plug loses at a race, irate gamblers take a few pot shots at Barney Hellum, and his entourage takes off. They pull up at a hotel, where they try to sneak the animals into the room room Hellum has rented, with predictable comic results.

It's a Barney Google short subject produced by Larry Darmour. Like his other short comedy series at the time, it's produced in an obviously cheap fashion with lots of wirework used to reproduce the effects from the Billy DeBeck cartoon. The result, alas, is more notable for the cheap effects than for any laughs.

Darmour would go on to eventually produce some good work in the early 1940s, but this is a poor late silent comedy.

Barney Google tries to work the old army game to get his trio of animals into the Ritzmore Hotel. They are a race horse and a porcupine and Rudy the ostrich. There is no way the animals are really going to be secreted in so we watch the pantomime goings-on they create. I reckon the most amusing escapade is when Rudy gets into the bedroom of a canoodling couple. There Rudy obeys the love-play instructions of the woman and then the man. "Kiss your little baby's teeny-weeny ear, Daddy" coos the woman and Rudy obliges. I enjoyed this fifteen minutes of fun from 1928. It's straight from the Library of Congress with no added audio. It's the first Barney Hellum movie I've seen. There's a very tall actor named Tiney Ward as the hotel owner. But it's Rudy the ostrich I really love, craning his long neck out of a window to retrieve a key.