Crazy House

An MGM Colortone Novelty Short.

A prospective patient takes a tour of the Lame Brain Sanitarium. It only takes a few minutes in the CRAZY HOUSE to show him that everyone, staff included, is insane.

A completely inane little film, with jokes so bad it becomes quite funny. During his short stroll, Benny Rubin meets Karl Dane, Cliff Edwards & the ubiquitous Polly Moran. Dancer Snake Hips performs a remarkable routine which proves he has no bones in his body whatsoever. And ending the film with four murders is supposed to be the biggest joke of all.

It's rough to see actor Karl Dane be subjected to humiliation & ridicule, even in fun. A comic star in silent films, his thick Danish accent would soon sabotage his talkie career and within a few years he would die a suicide.

Benny Rubin visits Vernon Dent in the insane asylum and they engage in some nonsensical cross-talk, followed by similar dialogue and sight gags, some of which were pulled from the abandoned THE MARCH OF TIME.

The best bit is watching Earl Tucker doing one of his 'snake hip' dances. There is also some technical interest in the use of two-strip Technicolor. The print that plays occasionally on Turner Classic Movies is very well preserved, and shows the process's ability to emulate reality.

Up until recently, I had never heard of Benny Rubin. However, I was able to download several of his RKO comedy shorts for free at archive.org--and wasn't all that impressed with his very ethnic humor. I was surprised to see only a week later that Turner Classic Movies showed one of his films--a very early color comedy from MGM. Because of my other experiences with Rubin, I set my expectations very low! Benny shows up at a sanitarium where he meets with the doctor (Vernon Dent). Lots of typical Rubin verbal humor ensues. Then, one of the doctor's assistants shows Rubin around the place. Inexplicably, the place has a radio program (????) and everyone around the place WAY overplays their crazy routines. In the middle of this goofiness, a black man does a very strange dance routines that has NOTHING to do with the film nor does the subsequent musical number--both of which are, apparently, part of the radio program.

Like the other Rubin films I saw, I just didn't like this one. Rubin's verbal schtick just didn't appeal to me as it didn't seem funny. The only things that made me laugh all happened in the final scene (which was pretty cute). Not recommended unless you adore Borscht-Belt comedy.

By the way, the color appears to be a two-color process where an orange-red strip and a green-blue strip are overlapped on a black & white strip. Cinecolor and Two-Strip Technicolor used this process and the film used the primitive Technicolor print.

Not much to add beyond what a previous reviewer stated, except for that the print currently airing on TCM is missing a four minute musical segment featuring the Albertina Rasch Ballet dancers, who remain credited in the opening titles. More than likely, this sequence was "lifted" from the abandoned 1930 revue "The March of Time," which makes its absence from this print all the more frustrating.

Benny Rubin tries to check himself into a asylum run by Dr. Smith, spelled J-O-N-E-S. His secretary who wears only the front half of a dress and talks into an imaginary telephone. There's someone who tries to play a violin on the asylum's radio station (upstairs in the basement), but she breaks her G-string (on the violin, on the vi-o-lin, get your mind out of the gutter) and then breaks the violin.

There are some, I guess, sailors, one of which has invented an unbreakable plate that shatters on the floor. There are two other similarly dressed sailors laughing uncontrollably, while usually tough guy Nat Pendleton is dressed as a chef. Pendleton gets hit in the face with a plate full of beans. Beans occasionally appeared in some of Salvador Dali's work of the period, but I don't know if there was any intention of making a connection to the Surrealist movement in this short.

The humor falls short a lot of the times, although if you look at this through a surrealist mindset, you might find this more enjoyable.