Second Hand Husband

During the 1930s, stage comic Tom Howard made a series of shorts for Educational Pictures. While I found many of them to be quite funny, they weren't particularly successful and Howard's foray into films was brief and never resulted in full-length movies.

When the film begins, Howard's alarm goes off and his wife begins haranguing him to get up and go to work. It's pretty obvious they don't have a happy marriage and she keeps talking about how her first husband, Oscar, was a better man.

When Howard does arrive at work, he's fired. While he got to work in plenty of time, he apparently forgot to come the previous two days! He knows what this will mean...the wife's complaints about him and praise of her first husband will be worse! So, he brings a couple friends with him...hoping she'll be less nasty when they are there.

One of the friends turns out to look a lot like Oscar...and Howard has had enough. He gets these friends to return at night to steal Oscar's ashes and rid them of his presence. But when they arrive, they find a real burglar in the house. Hilarity ensues....though not nearly as much as in some of Howard's other films.

Tom Howard has married a widow. She keeps comparing him to her first husband, to Howard's cost. To make himself seem nobler, he has pal George Shelton burgle the place. However, another burglar is also trying to break in, to general confusion.

Howard rose to prominence in the stage and movie versions of the Joe Cook comedy RAIN OR SHINE, and you can see clearly his stage roots in his timing and lazy demeanor. He never broke out to become a major screen comic, but his shorts are funny. He worked on stage and in radio (his best known show was IT PAYS TO BE IGNORANT) after his last movie appearance in 1936. He died in 1955 at the age of 69.