Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure

When 'Pennies from Heaven (1981)' presented audiences with a Depression-era America that was dirty and lewd, veteran musical performer Fred Astaire was aghast: "I have never spent two more miserable hours in my life. Every scene was cheap and vulgar. They don't realise that the thirties were a very innocent age." Well, I can't speak for the 1930s, but my notion of a pure and innocent 1920s has suddenly dissipated into thin air. 'Eveready Harton in Buried Treasure (1929)' is a silent animated short that simply defies belief – in the same year that Walt Disney affectionately sent skeletons dancing joyously through the night, one intrepid production company called "Climax Fables" (with no other IMDb credits) decided to turn the animation style on its head; no longer was it purely the domain of wholesome children's films. The "director" is a fellow named E. Hardon (they must have thought themselves geniuses to have come up with such a pun), and the main character is the exceptionally well-endowed Eveready Harton {whose name sounds vaguely like Edward Everett Horton, who by all accounts was such a nice man that I can't conceive any relationship between the two}.

Anyway, whether you enjoy this snippet of primitive animated pornography depends very much on your sense of humour. I had a few incredulous chuckles at the beginning, surprised at how explicitly the film dealt with sexual details that wouldn't again see the light of day in America until the 1960s. Then my unassailable prudishness came into play (the term originally had noble connotations, you know), and I found the film to be excessively vulgar, mean-spirited and stupid. 'Eveready Horton' is basically the animated equivalent of high school dropouts standing around in a circle exchanging lewd and bizarre sex stories – if you're into that sort of thing, then you'll probably find this curio a barrel of laughs. What else can you expect from Eveready Harton's Buried Treasures adventures? Well, there's a fifth appendage that frequently follows the title character around like a small dog, an encounter with (quite literally) crabs, a sword-fight that doesn't employ the use of swords, and something to do with a donkey of which I will speak no more. If you're laughing while reading this review, please feel free to seek out this film yourself, but I don't recommend it.