The Soilers

Soilers, The (1932)

** (out of 4)

Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd play friends who are trying to work their way through college by selling magazines from door to door. The wives at home don't want any so the girls decide to go to city hall and sell them to the men using a little leg to get the job done. This is a surprisingly lazy short that has one bad joke that keeps getting repeated over and over to the point where you really start to wonder if perhaps there was some sort of writer's strike going on that prevented anything else from being written. The joke starts off with the girls trying to sell to women but they simply close the door in their faces. We then go to city hall where the girls get into one mess after another and most of them revolve around a Judge who just happens to have received some death threats, which has his bodyguard on the look out for the girls. Once again Zasu and Thelma go busting in and out of offices with Thelma playing the sexy vamp and trying to get buyers from her legs. Then we get scenes of Zasu trying to do the same thing. Usually Zasu is right on the money but sadly that's not the case here as she seems bored with the material and you really can't blame her. She doesn't bring any of that zany energy and even worse is that she just sleeps through the part. Even Todd seems bored and not willing to put too much energy into it. THE SOILERS has one lame joke that goes on and on for 20-minutes so this here is certainly for fans of the series only.