A Pair of Tights

This is my review of the third and final short starring the comedy team of Anita Garvin and Marion "Peanuts" Byron. I had first seen parts of this one in one of Robert Youngson's silent comedy compilation films, When Comedy Was King. It seemed amusing enough. Now that I've watched the whole thing, it's even funnier than I anticipated, that's for sure! It seems the two women are very hungry so Marion mentions that her boyfriend (Stuart Erwin) is bringing his boss (Edgar Kennedy) over to their apartment and they may take them out to dinner. But when Edgar sees them, he doesn't want to spend so much money on them so when during a car ride, Marion suggests getting ice cream cones, Edgar gives her the suitable amount of change he has in his pocket. The main hilarity involves those ice cream in those cones that Marion keeps losing though there's also a cop trying to keep the car three of those four are in from being parked illegally to add to the fun as well as a teen boy and his father in the apartment above harassing them. It seemed to lose steam near the end but otherwise, A Pair of Tights was a near-perfect comedy in the usual Hal Roach style. After this one, Anita Garvin was back in supporting roles including in a few more Laurel & Hardy ones during the talkie era. One of her last appearances in film was in The Three Stooges' Coocoo Cavaliers before retiring to tend to her husband Clifford "Red" Stanley and their two kids. She'd eventually be honored by the Sons of the Desert society-which is dedicated to the celebration of Laurel & Hardy-during the late '70s and '80s. She died on July 7, 1994. Marion "Peanuts" Byron left Hal Roach after this and in subsequent years, found her parts getting smaller and smaller. Her last film appearance was in 1938's Five of a Kind which was co-written by her hubby Lou Breslow who'd subsequently write the first two of L & H's features at 20th Century-Fox. She and Lou had two sons and remained together until she died on July 5, 1985.

Anyone who says Laurel and Hardy were intended for the parts played by Kennedy and Erwin has never seen this picture. Ed and Stu do very little other than drive around looking for a place to park; the majority of the comedy is handled by Peanuts Byron with some support from Anita Garvin, especially in the first reel. Her attempts at getting ice cream cones. continually thwarted by bratty Spec O'Donnell, provide the highlight of the movie. A good "tit for tat" sequence at the end may reinforce the L&H theory, but remember this is a Roach product, with Roach gag men. All else aside, this is a very funny picture available on YouTube and worth your twenty minutes.

In The Silent Clowns (a book it is difficult to refer to without the adjective "magisterial"), Walter Kerr suggests that there were no important comediennes in the silent era because actresses were handicapped by the requirement that they be pretty, which, he suggests, prevented them from being really funny. Maybe Kerr never saw A PAIR OF TIGHTS. Anita Garvin and Marion Byron, in their third pairing, take their share of pratfalls without sacrificing their allure. The teaming of tall, statuesque, sultry Anita with tiny, cute-as-a-bug Marion was Hal Roach's attempt to create a distaff Laurel and Hardy, with Anita as the bossy Ollie and Marion as the hapless Stan. Their first effort, FEED 'EM AND WEEP, borrowed heavily from L&H's FROM SOUP TO NUTS (in which Anita has one of her finest moments as the nouveau-riche hostess defeated by a wobbly tiara and an elusive cherry), with everyone falling face-first into trays of food and Marion waiting tables in her underwear. The girls' gameness is impressive—and they really were girls, Marion just 17 and Anita all of 21—but the material is pretty shopworn.

A PAIR OF TIGHTS takes a different and much more promising tack. Instead of trying to be Laurel and Hardy, the girls play themselves, and deal with uniquely feminine problems like lousy dates. Here they are ravenous roommates stuck with a couple of tightwads (see the title) who don't want to take them out to dinner. When the men arrive, Marion canoodles with boyfriend Stu Erwin while Anita subjects Edgar Kennedy to a withering deadpan glare. In a long, long, long take, Kennedy squirms and fidgets under Anita's stony, disgusted gaze, before finally managing to open with, "So, how are you?" This is a perfect example of how total inaction can be funnier than people falling on their butts—which is exactly what Anita does when Kennedy gets up off his end of the piano bench where they're sitting.

The four set out for a drive, and Kennedy agrees to spring for ice cream cones. The rest of the film follows Marion's efforts to carry four cones through a set of swinging doors—she is hit from behind, from the front, attacked by a dog, and finally tormented by a horrid freckle-faced boy—while the three in the car get into a dispute with a cop who forces them to drive around and around the block, with Anita still glowering at her date. The film concludes with one of those escalating street battles that were a specialty of the Roach lot, following the exponential spread of quid pro quo as pedestrians start ripping each others' pants off or pasting each other with pies.

Anita and Marion never made another film together, which is a shame because they're both delightful and deserved to be in the spotlight. Anita Garvin will always be remembered by Laurel and Hardy fans for her menacing, vampy performances, while Marion "Peanuts" Byron is best known as Buster Keaton's leading lady in STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.

One last thought: just what WAS that stuff that passed for ice-cream, pie filling and pretty much any other foodstuff in silent comedies? I sure hope it was good for the complexion.

I realize this very funny picture was produced by Hal Roach and starred a comedy team, but I don't see how anyone can believe that Kennedy and Erwin played roles intended for Laurel and Hardy. The two men do little more than drive around the block for more than half the picture while Peanuts Byron gets all the gags. If anything, Stan and Ollie would have played the girls' parts and would have been more of a team than Peanuts and Anita were. The ice cream routines with Spec O'Donnell are highlights, as is the final "reciprocal destruction" scene, but it's unfair to compare this delightful short with a true Laurel and Hardy picture. Forget The Boys, watch The Girls; they're funny, too.

It can be difficult to be a silent film fan. You have to deal with so many silly misconceptions, like the idea that every woman in silent cinema was a damsel lashed to the rail road tracks. Pure bunk! Another silly misconception is that there were no female comedians during this period either, that they were too concerned with physical beauty to be able to do anything goofy on film. Also bunk. There were a number of comediennes during the silent era, the most beloved nowadays being Mabel Normand and Marion Davies.

A Pair of Tights (1929) is a late silent short which features a female comedy pairing: Anita Garvin and Marion Byron (best remembered for working with Buster Keaton in his last independent feature, Steamboat Bill Jr). Garvin's imposing physique and tough attitude pair wonderfully with Byron's petite frame and girlish disposition. In this short, the two are hungry and hope their dates will take them out to dinner. Unfortunately, their male consorts are tightwads, only willing to get them ice cream cones. Of course, being a Hal Roach film, you know this won't end well: fate itself seems to conspire to make sure nobody gets a single lick off those cones as Marion finds them constantly knocked out of her hands in increasingly silly ways.

It's a cute short, full of personality and relate-able situations for anyone who's ever been on a crummy date. However, it does get a little repetitious in the last five minutes. I also prefer the quieter first half with more character-based gags than the hectic second, complete with cops and obnoxious preteen boys, but it's still so much fun. If only Garvin and Byron had been allowed to do more shorts than the few collaborations they managed!