All Stuck Up

When the union paper hangers strike, two idiots try to paper a room, occasionally throwing paste onto the bridge party taking place right next to them.

It's a series of low vaudeville or perhaps burlesque routines, involving a man dressing up as a woman,a drunk trying to make love to him, and other assorted bits stuck together with no sense of space. The director is George Lemaire, who spent most of his life as a straight man in two-acts. He served in this role to Louis Simon and Eddie Cantor. Besides appearing in a few movies at the dawn of sound, he directed a dozen short comedies for Pathe, while it was being absorbed into RKO. He died the year this was released.

In 1929, when Pathé had ceased releasing the Roach and Sennett shorts, they hired George LeMaire to produce/direct a series of talking comedies. LeMaire was a stage personality and sometime recording star, and supposedly was a comic genius. This one, late in the series, gives cause to dispute that status.

The patter is loaded with cringingly obvious setups. When first is mentioned, in a room where wallpaper is being hung, that one of the difficulties will be to "Hang the Border", instantly, you know that someone's going to hear it as "Hang the Boarder". And the phrase is so funny, it's said many times. The slapstick is painfully slow and has no surprises. When, viz a viz, a Bridge game has a fat gal express hope for "a grand slam", of course, she will get some sort of assault. It comes in the form of flying wallpaper paste. There's tons of it being thrown on people and things with graceless, break-up filled camera work. Incompetent paper hanger stories had been done for a long time, and nothing new happens here, perhaps this might be the first talkie version, but I don't know. The pointless inclusion of a gross female impersonator makes for a strange time.

LeMaire might have gotten better, but he died young, at 45, and in fact this film was released the day he died.

"All Stuck Up" is a painfully unfunny short from writer/director George Lemaire. Much of it is that it plays like a series of Vaudeville bits instead of a film about real people. And, much of it is because no one can be as stupid as the two paperhangers in this film.

A rich couple has hired men to wallpaper their house. Soon, however, their boss tells them they're going on strike and the couple are stuck with a room that is completely torn apart by these workers. So, the wife nags the husband to find some paperhangers and he finds two sub-humans who manage to make Moe, Curly and Larry look like Nobel Prize winners!

In the meantime, and completely unrelated to this, a transvestite performer arrives at the house and pretends to be a society lady. Why? I have no idea.

The film is just terrible and it's incredibly overdone and unfunny. The only thing of interest might be the cross-dresser, as it's the type act you might have seen in pre-code Hollywood but NEVER once the new code was enacted beginning in July, 1934. Such characters were then strictly taboo.

Had the film been subtle and in any way believable (even for a comedy) it might have been enjoyable. But the lack of a real plot, some bad acting by the paperhangers and the lack of laughs make this very tough going.