Two discharged sailors rent a car so they can take some girls on a date in a 1928 short comedy. It's not Laurel & Hardy's TWO TARS, but is it a rip-off? Stan & Ollie's movie was released on November 3, and the release date of this is unknown, but eight weeks seems abrupt, and it might have come out first. Neither were Stan & Ollie the first successful Fat-and-Skinny comedy pairing; Pat & Patachon had been going for half a decade in Europe. If Snub Pollard and Marvin Loback lacked the camaraderie of Laurel & Hardy, so too did just about everyone else, and director Leslie Goodwins, whose second comedy short this was, would prove himself to be a capable director of such fare. So let's set aside the question of whether this is as good as Leo McCarey directing the Boys, because it isn't, and look at it on its own merits, as a slapstick comedy, impure and simple-minded.
On that basis it's pretty good. Loback was a second-tier fat comic at Sennett at best, but that was no disgrace, and Pollard was a fine white-faced clown and gag technician. The gags average a bit cruder than I prefer, but anyone who's seen Anita Garvin slip on a cream pie, or everyone on the Roach lot tearing everyone else's trousers off has seen almost all before. There's little character here. The leads are two sailors who stick together because that's what they do, but that's good enough, and the gags come fast. Pretty good.
