Skirt Shy (1929)
* (out of 4)
Incredibly bad Hal Roach short has Harry Langdon dressing in drag, pretending to be the home's owner who plans on making sure the elderly man she wants to marry waits at the house until the real owner gets home. While all of this is going on another man in love with the woman shows up and soon the two men are fighting it out while Langdon, in drag, keeps it going. I'm sure I'll get some death threats due to this but I'm really not a big fan of Langdon. I still need to see some of his classic work but I haven't been too impressed with his pre-Capra silent shorts and this entry in the sound game didn't improve my opinion either. I'm not going to blame all the issues on Langdon but at the same time I can't see any type of "performance" from the man. We'll start with the screenplay, which is a downright joke as nothing much happens and what does happen certainly isn't funny. For nearly fifteen-minutes we see the two men fight it out with fists, guns and a variety of other ways while both are too stupid to notice that the woman they're fighting for isn't a woman at all. It's not as if they did Langdon up to make him look like a woman so this gag is ruined right from the start. None of the fights are all that good and the only thing that mad me laugh was the one punch thrown by the old man early on. The entire film looks like a bunch of outtakes thrown together and it's pretty incoherent as well. I know fans of Langdon will want to see him in anything so this is certainly recommended for them only.
