All American Drawback

Boring and poorly executed EDGAR BERGEN/CHARLIE McCARTHY short, in which Charlie is improbably being touted as a football hero who will be expelled from college unless he passes the next exam.

What might have been a promising comedy short becomes terribly dull from the opening scene onward, without an ounce of wit in the script and with Charlie not looking quite the way he would once Bergen had polished and perfected his act in the '40s.

Poor performances from the supporting cast doesn't help and the whole thing is quite forgettable with nary a genuine laugh in sight. My only reason for watching is that it's featured on the CAPTAIN BLOOD DVD as a short subject from Warner Bros.

All-American Drawback (1935)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy comedy set at a college where McCarthy is a major football star. One day coach Bergen gets called into the office and is told that his star is failing all of his classes so he'll have to get his grades up or else there will be no more football. If you've seen any of these shorts then you should already know what to expect. I find all of them to be quite hit and miss and while this here isn't one of the best it's certainly far from the worst. The strange thing is that we're introduced to this story of McCarthy failing early on and yet it really doesn't factor into anything that follows. We get two more sequences where we get the typical Bergen-McCarthy act. One takes place on the football sidelines and the other at a dance where of course McCarthy does a lot of flirting. There are a few funny moments to be found here but there's simply not enough to carry the small 8-minute running time. There are some funny moments on the sideline including when they need a full stretcher to take McCarthy off the field. The rest of the film has the type of humor you'd expect and most of it doesn't work. Still, if you can put up with the duo this one here isn't that bad.