A Straight Crook

Eddie Boland plays a guy who cannot pay his hotel bill. After awakening from a bender, he's told by the hotel manager that he must stay and work off his bill...and the intertitle card indicates it should be paid in full by 1950!

Soon the new bellhop is asked by a publicity-hungry actress to hold her jewels. She reports them stolen and the cops begin suspecting the bellhop. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot get rid of the box with the jewels in it...and she won't take them back or tell the truth about the fake robbery. By the end, all is well and life is good.

There is nothing wrong with this film except that there aren't many laughs. Mildly fun but nothing more.

One of the weaker examples of the usually dependable Eddie Boland comedies for Hal Roach. After a sputtering start, he's a bellhop in a hotel where a publicity hungry celebrity fakes having her jewelry stolen so she can see her name in the papers. The comedy titles are also pretty forced -- I doubt they were written by H.M. Walker! The first gag, though, is a very good one.

As Harold Lloyd moved into three reelers and features, Hal Roach needed someone to replace him in one- and two-reelers. He had already set up Snub Pollard with his own series and had tried an aborted series with Toto, filled out with Stan Laurel, but Lloyd's success made clear the market for the light comedian -- someone who could take a pratfall and woo the leading lady. So Roach gave Eddie Boland a series of shorts for a couple of years and they are actually good -- a mixed bag of gags -- but somehow they were never tremendously popular, so eventually he closed down the series and stuck his ace director, Charley Chase back in front of the camera.