Free and Easy

I have enjoyed Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, so my very low score of this is NOT because I hate the act. The problem is mostly that "Free and Easy" just isn't funny--and that's bad when it's supposed to be a comedy. In addition, there really isn't a whole lotta plot here.

The film begins with Edgar and Charlie sitting around the campfire with some other hobos. Then, the film does a dream sequence where the pair are trying to convince a medium to communicate with the spirit of some dead rich guy so they can find out where he hid his fortune. Not a whole lot more to this one...including not a single laugh. Perhaps the team really needed a foil--someone to play against. That's because their films and radio appearances with W.C. Fields were brilliant--and full of laughs. Here, you just have a situation with no purpose or chuckles...NONE. Unless, of course, you think just being poor is funny.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy are enjoying a quiet evening around the fire in the hobo jungle with the other bums. They go to a gypsy, hoping she will tell them where a fortune has been buried.

Edgar Bergen started out in vaudeville, made a series of shorts for Vitaphone. He achieved his greatest success on the radio. This sounds bizarre, and frankly, it is. But comic ventriloquism has and continues to depend more on the quality of the jokes and the timing, rather than enjoying has the ventriloquist holds his head so you have a hard time seeing his lips move. Bergen was very good at this, and his career extended into feature movies and television.

Edger Bergen was a great voice man. His voice characterization of Charlie McCarthy was superb. He was most effective in radio. In this short piece, when he was a younger man, his ventriloquism skill is more evident than later on, but if you watch closely, you still see his lips move a lot. He handles Charlie McCarthy with great skill and all of his efforts seem to be dedicated to making the dummy real in our eyes. He succeeds admirably. The problem with this little short is that it is remarkably weak as far as the storyline is concerned. There is very little material to work with, but Bergen does the best that he can. The young lady who plays the part of the fortuneteller is very easy to watch and adds the only other element besides Bergen and McCarthy that makes this an entertaining piece. I would have voted higher except for the plot.

The Professor (Edgar Bergen) and his puppet Charlie McCarthy are hobos. Charlie tells the rumor of hidden treasure in an abandoned mansion. They ask Kamisha, the Gypsy, to look into her crystal ball. The Professor pretends to the late owner Herbie Larkin's brother. They are chased out of town and they ride off in a railcar with the other hobos.

I'm not a big fan of them and maybe that's why I'm not so disappointed. The score is way too low. There are a couple of funny jokes. I don't know what people are expecting. The only missing bit is the abandoned mansion. It's disappointing when the whole short is gearing towards going to the old house and they don't do it. Nevertheless, it's slightly funny and it's only a short. I'm not expecting that much.

Free and Easy (1931)

** (out of 4)

Not to be confused with the Buster Keaton feature that was made the year before, this short from MGM features Edgar Bergen and his puppet Charlie McCarthy playing a hobo and his (what else?) puppet sidekick. The duo hear about a man who just died and left a large treasure buried somewhere in his house so they go to a gypsy girl to try and see if they can locate it. These Bergen/McCarthy shorts are always hit and miss and this one here is one of the weaker entries in the series. It's funny but this thing lasts just over 7-minutes and there's really not a single laugh to be had. I'd say the one highlight, if I had to pick one, was when they're having the gypsy look into the future and a skeleton shows up to which McCarthy says he hasn't a bone to pick with it. The rest of the film has a few cheap jokes that really aren't funny and we get some "haunted" humor, which includes some flying devices and there's even a sequence where they're communicating with the dead. It's common knowledge that MGM sucked dry some of their most talented artists because the studio forced their ways into certain acts. I often wonder if that's what happened to this duo on many of their shorts because they were known for laughter but this here contains none.