Torchy Turns Turtle

In total, Ray Cooke made a dozen 'Torchy' shorts in the early 1930s. Most of them are pretty enjoyable but "Torchy Turns Turtle" is not. It's very contrived and the plot is just bizarre....but not in a good way.

The story begins with a room full of spies disguised as Arabs. Why? I have no idea, as it just doesn't make sense. Soon these spies break into Torchy's boss' office and take him prisoner and steal some secret formula. The boss then fires Torchy...even though Torchy was doing EXACTLY what the boss told him to do. So, the boss' daughter (who's swet on Torchy) has a plan...to get Torchy to join the boss' social club, The Turtles, as the boss couldn't fire a fellow lodge member. Instead of arriving at the Turtle lodge, he ends up infiltrating the group of spies and thinks their costumes and lions are all a put-on. Somehow through all this, Torchy manages to save the day.

The film makes no sense at all...period. It seems that perhaps the writers had run out of ideas....and here it shows.

One of those gangs of Arab spies who use to infest Wall Street in their colorful native costumes steals a super-secret bomb formula from Edmund Breese's safe. Naturally he blames his office boy, Ray Cooke. Breese's daughter, Marion Shockley, tells Torchy the way back into her father's graces is to join his lodge, the Turtles.... but they have rough initiations. She drives him to what they imagine is the lodge hall, which is where the Arab gang is waiting, expecting a master spy, for whom they mistake Cooke.

It's a series of events that could happen to anyone, including the sequence where Cooke shoots out every bullet from a Thompson machine-gun without harming a dozen or so men and two lions.

For some reason, I thought this one too stupid to be funny.