At Sea Ashore

Wow – a tough trio of reviewers for this one! I very much like Patsy Kelly's performances – to me she is not abrasive but refreshing and entertainingly expressive. I thought there were a number of really funny bits including the business of Mr. Rumplemeyer's trousers going through the donut machine and Patsy's trying to avoid the cabbie by claiming she just got off the boat and the last gag delivered by Rumplemeyer. Lyda Roberti was okay but her song and dance number was pretty bland. I liked this short and am glad I saw it. Besides, how can one not like a comedy that has an actor in it who evidently gave himself the name of Joe Twerp?

Al Shean, of the great vaudeville team of Gallagher & Shean, had buried his partner seven years before this, the next to last of the Roach 'Girl Friends' series was released, and they could have dug up the corpse for something that smelled less. Thelma Todd was dead and Lyda Roberti, paired here with Patsy Kelly would be dead in a year and there's no chemistry. Well, Roach was shutting down short subject production and these were almost certainly made simply to fill contracts with MGM. There's an air of cheapness, not only in the sets but in the poor doubling, the cheating close-up shots to disguise them and what looks like Jules-White style wirework.

Miss Roberti does have a nice musical interlude early on with the Avalon Boys, but between her accent and her family training as a circus clown, she offers little sense of byplay and makes Miss Kelly's brashness even more annoying than usual. A sad successor to the early Todd-Pitts entries in the series. Longtime Roach cameraman Art Lloyd manages some nice camera-work, but I'd miss this one if I were you.

Among the worst shorts that the Hal Roach Studio produced were the Thelma Todd/Zasu Pitts films. They made quite a few but they just weren't particularly funny. Zasu's shtick was sounding like Olive Oyl with adenoids and eventually they decided to replace her with the loud and abrasive Patsy Kelly. This really wasn't much of an improvement and the series limped along. However, oddly, after the suspicious death of Thelma Todd, the brilliant minds at Roach decided to keep the series going by substituting the Polish actress Lyda Roberti in Todd's place--a very bizarre decision in hindsight. Why pick Roberti other than the fact that she, too, was a blonde?! With her heavy accent and lack of screen presence or talent, the series limped along...barely...until Roberti's very premature death.

Patsy is sent by her boss to pick up a lady from the boat. The lady turns out to be Lyda and they get into some very contrived trouble--and none of it's particularly funny. There's a running gag about a cop and a cabbie and Patsy pretending to be a foreigner (oh, it is BAD). None of it is funny and you just wonder why Lyda was there in the first place--she was about as entertaining as smallpox and barely spoke the language. She and Patsy are so terrible together that the film manages to make the Kelly-Todd films look great by comparison. Dreadful.

At Sea Ashore (1936)

* (out of 4)

After the death of Thelma Todd the Hal Roach studio tried to keep a comedy "team" going so they teamed Patsy Kelly up with Lyda Roberti for two films. This one here has Kelly asked by her boss to go to the immigration office and pick up his niece (Roberti). Kelly agrees to do so but once down there she gets all sorts of trouble started. Who knows what was going on at the Roach studio after they lost one of their most popular comedians but this film here is just downright awful from start to finish and there's not a single laugh to be had. I'm sure they were just trying to find some sort of magic for Kelly but Roberti certainly wasn't the right selection. The screenplay itself is downright awful as we get no good jokes and not a single laugh in the entire film up until the closing seconds. Most of the jokes deal with Kelly sneaking into the office and then being unable to get out because she can't prove that she didn't just get off the boat. None of this stuff is funny and it ends with a very stupid sequence of her being put into a trunk so they can sneak her out but of course all sorts of bad things happen while she's in there. None of it is funny. Towards the start of the film we even get a musical number that doesn't work.

Time to make some dough! Working for Rumplemeyer's Bakery, Patsy gets handed the thankless task of meeting Mr. Rumplemeyer's daughter at the immigration center. The Avalon Boys just happen to be there when we meet Lyda getting off the boat, and they're swingin' up a storm with their take of "Broadway Rhythm." This scene can be funny sometimes. Chill Wills is no Chaplin, O fellow film buff (or buffettes) but he's always been one to provide a smile to those in need of one.

Baker is an annoyed cab driver ("Ski and Sko and Skum!") and the longer he waits, the angrier he gets. How hilarious!

Kelly has to keep proving to the immigration officials that she's truly an American citizen and not a foreigner, but she can't because she doesn't have her passport on her. I ABSOLUTELY cannot resist this stuff....

I'll tell you what.

There is a scene in it that's got a sign hanging on the wall that reads: "BREAD AIDS DIGESTION."

If that was the only funny scene in the whole of the entire length of this short subject, then that's TOTALLY fine by me! Okay, so it's no "Tillie's Punctured Whatever" with Chaplin, Dressler, Chase, and Normand. So what?!

The whole Bavarian bakery-immigration office shebang is such a success to me, that I think it seems like a goldarn shame Lyda wasn't around for more of these. She's like the rainbow sprinkles on this large hunk of devil's food cake, and I recommend anything she's in practically, including "The Kid From Spain" with Eddie Cantor. Speaking of large hunks, Kelly's scene in the suitcase is a yowl and a howl.

If the whole dang thing was only five minutes long, I'd still give it a 10/10.