New News

I'm glad that Jules White (comedy short head-honcho at Columbia) believed in writer/comedian Monte Collins, giving him roles wherever he could. The rubber-faced Collins (whose looks remind me of Jim Varney) is great at playing an exasperated or overly eager character, and he meshes well with the lumbering, dim-witted character played by Tom Kennedy (see my review of FREE RENT). In this short, they are laundry workers who are mistaken for newspaper reporters, and then assigned to go undercover and get pictures of a society party. They pose as cooks/servants, and get into the swank affair, and of course they mess up everything AND they discover that everything is not what it seems. This plot and these characters seem familiar--was this short later re-tooled for The Three Stooges? or was the Stooges short the original? Perhaps Bud Jamison was also the head butler in the Stooge version as he is here? In any event, NEW NEWS is the perfect Columbia short with wild physical slapstick, goofy situations and characters, and hilarious problems with food and machinery. If you like the fast pace and reckless abandon of a Columbia comedy short, check out this example of the comic wizardry of Collins and Kennedy. Wouldn't it be great if we could see this kind of thing on television?