Alibi Bye Bye

This 20 minute short was my first experience with the Clark and McCullogh comedy team. I had an excellent trip back to 1935 to experience the zany comedy which kept me, and the rest of the patrons at the Capitol cinema, in a state of continuous laughter.

I wasn't sure what to expect at first. Were these guys going to be spouting silly commentary like Wheeler and Woolsey, or physical comedy like Chaplin or the Marx Brothers. In reality it was a bit of both, but the clear central figure was Bobby Clark.

Groucho painted on his mustache but Clark is sillier still, painting on his eyeglasses. That is not the source of the humor though. It is fast moving, silly, and hillarious.....filled with slapstick comedy and verbal plays. Clark is like Harpo and Groucho in one body and the scenes of rotating people in various hotel rooms/hallways/showers is not something you see captured on film anymore.

Don't miss this one if you get a chance.

I remember Bobby Clark from TV in the 50's, maybe the Ed Sullivan Show, and I thought he was amusing. Never saw one of his shorts until now, and he was really funny, a cross between Harpo and Jerry Lewis. He has the same manic style of humor complete with a horn under his coat. Had never seen McCullough and he was more of a straight man.

The plot is fittingly outlandish. A man plans a trip to Atlantic City but tells his wife he is going hunting in the woods with a friend. Naturally, his wife gets invited to A. C. by her friend in the same hotel and there is a frantically paced scene of hall doors closing with people switching rooms. It's been done before but here the effect is very fast and funny. Side-splitting would be a good adjective.

See it if you can. I saw it at Capitolfest, Rome, N. Y. 8/23, Library of Congress print.

******** 8/10. Website no longer prints my star ratings.

This Clark and McCullough short subject provides the boys with an interesting occupation. They are professional photographers in Atlantic City. Their specialty is background shots for the straying husbands and wives who need proof they were anywhere but Atlantic City for a little fun and frolic without the spouse.

On one auspicious day they take a picture with a favorite client with a forest background and a moose head so he can prove he was on a hunting trip. Bud Jamison is looking to get away from the wife, but unbeknownst to him, wife Constance Bergen is down there to frolic herself.

The last half of the short subject is Bobby and Paul running through a hotel floor in and out of rooms trying to elude manager Harrison Greene and trusty house detective Tom Kennedy. Kennedy as house detective was warming up for his role as the brain dead police detective in the Torchy Blane series.

It gets kind of wild and even more risqué. Funny stuff, but definitely not G-rated.

During the 1930s, Clark & McCullough were a popular comedy team on stage. However, in films they only made a minor splash--with about three dozen short films to their credit. Part of the reason they didn't do full-length films was their style of humor--it was wild and crazy but exhausting to watch. But the biggest reason is because Paul McCullough killed himself...and Clark's career, not surprisingly, took a plunge. Looking back, you almost wonder why the studios didn't try combining Bobby Clark with Bert Wheeler, as Wheeler's annoying partner Robert Woolsey was much like Clark in looks and style...plus they all worked for RKO. Regardless, there are only a few of the Clark & McCullough shorts available and "Alibi Bye Bye" is one of them.

The film owes a lot to the earlier Laurel & Hardy film "Sons of the Desert". In it, Stan and Ollie pretend that they're going on a cruise for Ollie's health...but they're really headed for fun at Atlantic City.

In "Alibi Bye Bye", Clark & McCullough have a very interesting business in Atlantic City--they take photos with fake backdrops (such as Washington, DC) so that philandering spouses have alibis when they return home! All this comes to a head when a husband and wife separately plan on a week of whoopee and they are staying in the same hotel! Can the boys help the pair avoid each other or will there be a wild confrontation?

This film is almost non-stop action--enough for a 50 minute film instead of a 20 minute short. Some of the jokes and action do fall flat...and Clark's stupid growling is really annoying. But a lot of the silliness is rather fun and charming...if you could call adultery charming, that it!

This RKO short was my first exposure to the comedy team of Clark and McCollough, and they certainly made an impression, if not necessarily a great one. They, and the short, are as wacky as, well, a man wearing a pair of painted-on eyeglasses. Often they seem to be wacky without any kind of consistent character or situation to ground the wackiness, and that makes them fall flat more often than they should. The film is so frenetic in pace and the gags come so fast that it almost (but only almost) makes you forget that they aren't actually very good. The flimsy set-up involving the two stars as alibi photographers for an unknowing husband and wife quickly becomes as excuse for a lot of people to run through doors as fast as they can and for Bobby Clark to act like a cut-rate Groucho Marx who has stolen Harpo's horn and developed a fondness for making gargling noises at the women he chases.