Treasure Blues (1935)
** (out of 4)
Flat comedy has Thelma Todd working in a restaurant flipping pancakes and Patsy Kelly sitting at home unemployed. Patsy receives a letter that her rich uncle has left her his estate but it turns out to be just a treasure map. Thelma and Patsy take off to find the treasure with the help of a drunk sailor (Arthur Housman). It seems that the further this series went along that the star's salaries went up, which meant that less money could be spent on a screenplay. There's no question these films weren't meant to be as great as the ones from Laurel and Hardy but at the same time you'd think they'd at least put a little more imagination into the screenplay. There's really not too much that happens in this film and instead of anything funny going on we just get one bad joke after another and sadly each bad joke just keeps on and on. One early example is when Kelly gets the scuba helmet stuck on her head so we've got to see Thelma and the sailor trying to get it off. This unfunny sequence lasts at least three or four minutes. We then get a scene in the ocean where Patsy finds a sword and then fights a swordfish with it. Again, unfunny and it goes on way too long. We then get a long sequence at the end where the sailor finds some alcohol at the bottom of the sea so he decides to drink it down there. There really wasn't many funny sequences here as everything just came across rather poorly written and the execution wasn't even there. Both Todd and Kelly don't seem too impressed with the material either.
