Show Business

Show Business (1932)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Extremely annoying and unfunny Hal Roach short has Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts playing friends who get a call from their agent telling them to catch a train with their pet monkey because they've got a show to do. Of course, on board the train the monkey causes all sorts of trouble including bothering the main star (Anita Garvin) of the show. The more Todd-Pitts shorts I see I'm beginning to understand why the team didn't last too long. Again, perhaps I'll eventually get to some gems but this short is downright annoying and rather painful to watch. When it comes time to watch a comedy the last thing you want it to be is painful but that's exactly what we get here. The biggest problem is that the screenplay appears to have been written by the monkey because there's really no laughs to be found. Just take a look at one of the earliest scenes when Pitts is on the phone with the agent. We see her struggling with the cord. Not funny. When then see her go up the steps to her room only to forget something and go back to the phone. Not funny. We see her then walk back up the steps only to forget again and have to walk back down. Not funny. The stuff with the monkey causing trouble is something we've seen in countless other Roach shorts. I'd also say that Pitts and Todd have very little chemistry here and they really don't work too well off one another. Needless to say, that isn't good when we're talking about a comedy team. I think the only highlight is a sequence where Todd stands in a rather sexy lingerie, which at least gives us something to look at.

Here is a rare combination: Jules White and Hal Roach. White, of course, produced and directed comedy shorts for Columbia from 1934 to 1958. Leading Moe Howard, Larry Fine, Curly Howard, Shemp Howard, and Joe Besser through over 100 shorts, White's films moved fast and were loaded with violent sight gags. Roach's films were slower paced, relied heavily on sight gags, but were generally warmer and more creative than the Columbia product. This short contains many of White's trademark gags, but misses its mark because of gender. ZaSu Pitts is in Stan Laurel's role and Oliver Hardy's is played by Thelma Todd. With Stan and Oliver, this film could have been hilarious. However, White's gags are less effective when played by women. White's Columbia films with Vera Vague suffer from the same problem. Monte Collins, a favorite of White, has a small supporting role in the film. Here he is before his nose job. It is disconcerting, but still fascinating to see White gags performed on the familiar Roach sets, with Leroy Shield's background music and the darker lighting of the Roach product.

White did not work for Roach. He was, at this time, under contract to MGM, where he made the dreadful Dogville comedies, some droll Pete Smith sports shorts and the Keaton feature, "Sidewalks of New York". Roach, who distributed his product through MGM, must have borrowed White. White was about a year away from his long tenure at Columbia.

Show Business is the profession that Thelma Todd and Zasu Pitts are in, playing second and third banana to a trained monkey. They get a chance to go to the Pacific coast but with the monkey and with snooty musical comedy star Anita Garvin.

Through a combination of circumstances the monkey decides it wants to ride with the rest of Garvin's troupe. Think of Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in drag in Some Like It Hot. They had a sense of discretion that the monkey does not.

I have to say that both Thelma and Zasu are much upstaged by their little friend in Show Business.

The previous reviewer has made some nice points about the conflicts between the Roach style of comedy and the Jules White style of comedy, even though he has overstated the case slightly, I think. What he fails to notice, though, are two things that White did that were directly contrary to the Roach style.

1: Of lesser effect is the more overt use by White of money saving methods, including the use of backscreens once they became available in the early 1930s, and special effects such as wirework to guide thrown bric-a-brac; the straight-line movements are a giveaway visually. Roach's directors preferred to run things live, with extra takes, which cost a lot more, but produced much more realistic and telling effects. Funnier, too. White takes advantage of the live settings here.

2: More important is the effect of White's tone-deafness as a director. In a typical Roach piece, when people get angry, they all get angry in different ways: some fume, like Charlie Hall, some get emphatic like Laurel and Hardy, some gesticulate wildly, but the louder they get, the less they actually do: Billy Gilbert, shouting, is never a physical threat, but Jimmy Finlayson, raising his eyebrows and waggling his mustache, is.

But in this short subject, when people get angry, they all get angry the same way: they are loud and obnoxious. There is no soft, modulated "oh" from Zasu, there are no flared eyebrows from Anita, there is no glaring from Thelma. They just stand there and shout at each other. This lack of subtlety, this tone deafness does more to make this a poor short than all the wirework, loud sound effects and Monte Collins -- who was an effective comic actor for other producers -- than anything else.