Double Trouble

Snub Pollard and Marvin Loback lead this agreeable comedy about two would-be vaudevillians who are so awful they get booed off stage at rehearsal. Then, confronted with the necessity of maintaining life, they share a job repossessing a piano from their landlord.

Snub Pollard was a fine white-faced clown doing absurd things in a normal-looking world. His forte was gag construction, and his long series of shorts for Hal Roach often seemed to be a series of perfectly executed gags connected by the wispiest of circumstances; you might call them surrealistic, but 'absurd' is more than good enough. Loback was a competent supporting comedian of the fat variety, surprisingly limber and energetic. Together they starred in a couple of seasons of late silent comedy shorts for the Stern Brother that were pretty good on their own hook.

The problem was short budgets, so Pollard's big gags were not possible; and even more, the competition. There were many fine fat-and-skinny pairs, but these two paired up just when Laurel & Hardy came together, and the Sterns couldn't compete in terms of budget, gag writers, nor supporting comics. Even worse, they couldn't compete in terms of chemistry, and Stan and Ollie had it in spades, while Snub and Marvin were a couple of comics who could do all the gags, but had little extra.

So this is a pretty good comedy, but it is forgotten, and deservedly so. Why look at these two when you could look at Stan & Ollie?