New Adventures of Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford

... and maybe the best thing that he ever did in the sound era with the exception of perhaps "Are You Listening?". I'd say that this was his best comic performance and "Are You Listening?" had his best dramatic performance, although anything Haines did was going to have a big dose of comedy.

Wallingford (Haines), Blackie Daw (Ernest Torrance), and Schnozzle (Jimmy Durante) are partners in crime, con-artists always up to some racket. Their racket in this film was to form a clay pot company based out of the property that the parents of a girl with which he is infatuated (Leila Hyams) own. He does blasting on the property to get the interest of the locals, and by the time it is over they are practically begging him to let them invest in his new company. The plan is to get the locals to invest in stock in his bogus company and then skip town. But Wallingford's past sins are coming back to haunt him in the person of a cop who has been trailing him for years (Guy Kibbee). And also Wallingford finds himself truly falling for Hyams' character.

Louis B. Mayer really liked Durante, and he does work in this film, but he is every bit as much trouble as Gilligan was on Gilligan's Island. He is supposed to be the car thief of the bunch, but he keeps stealing various police vehicles, giving the trio the wrong kind of attention, and in general making the worst possible decisions with the best intentions.

It's interesting to see Guy Kibbee before he became a kind of perpetual Elmer Fudd character at Warner Brothers. Here he kind of reminds me of William Frawley - tough but with a heart.

There are a couple of interesting tie ins to other MGM films of that time. One is that Rochay's Beauty Parlor is clearly visible in a couple of the street scenes. That was the name of the beauty parlor in 1931's Reducing. The other is Henry Armetta playing a barber in the exact same barber shop set that was used in "The Sins of the Children" from 1930 where he also played a barber.

I'd highly recommend this to people who are fans of the precodes, although this really doesn't have a precode moment.