How to Clean House

Harrowed by his saxophone-playing brother-in-law and a mother-in-law who came for a week fifteen years ago and has stayed for breakfast in bed, Edgar Kennedy bets he can clean the house from top to bottom in this decent short subject from his long-running "Common Man" series at RKO.

It's one of those situations that was common in situation comedies and selected short subjects in days of yore. Husbands and wives would swap jobs, each confident that the other's tasks were so easy. Of course, disaster ensued.

Nor are the disasters much different than in any of the several other versions I (or you) may have seen. In such cases, what is interesting is the particular comic touches the players put on the situations, and Edgar Kennedy had learned his pratfalls at Keystone and developed his "slow burn" anger on his own. Those are the reasons to look at this particular short.