The Doughboy

Wow, it's confusing when you look up this title on IMDb! In 1926, there was this film as well as THE DOUGH BOY (by animator Paul Terry). There also were several other DOUGHBOY or DOUGHBOYS films (including one by Buster Keaton), so finding this Snub Pollard comedy took some research on my part! The film is a likable little comedy, though I will also admit that it's not among Pollard's best. He made it during the period in the mid-late 1920s when he went to works for the Weiss Brothers Studio.

The film begins with Snub going off to war in WWI. He manages to get lost behind enemy lines and spends most of the movie hiding or just barely escaping encounter after encounter with German soldiers. Many of them (especially when he's in no-man's land) are pretty funny but I also found that after a while the concept wore a bit thin. Additionally, the ending seemed amazingly abrupt and didn't leave the viewer with a lot. Still, it was often funny and clever, so it's worth seeking. By the way, it is available for viewing or download from www.archive.org, as it's in the public domain.

Like the previous IMDb reviewer, I saw this Snub Pollard comedy courtesy of the public domain treasure-trove that is the Internet Archive. I hadn't been as familiar with Pollard's work at the Weiss Brothers studio after he left Hal Roach, and this is an example from that period.

Snub was always distinguished by his "Kaiser Wilhelm" moustache, and here he's shown fighting the Kaiser as a "doughboy." It's a little shocking to think that only a decade after the most catastrophic war in human history up to its time, light comedies like this were already being made about it.

Maybe it has to do with smaller budgets at Weiss, but the kind of outlandish Rube Golberg-esquire visual lunacy and experimentation with the comedy-short form that made so many of Pollard's Roach sorts memorable is not so much in evidence here. It's not entirely gone; it's just not so much in evidence. There are some nice clever gags involving Snub hiding in a suit made of sandbags, coincidentally missing all the Germans that seem to be surrounding him, or hiding a kid in his jacket and sneaking him food.

However, most of the film is taken up with a lot of rather tired gags that have Snub being a prototypical stupidly bad soldier or being chased around by Germans. Add to the that there isn't too much of a sustained story and you don't have all that much, although Snub is a good comic performer and keeps things entertaining enough.