Red Lights Ahead

I'm a great fan of comic actor Andy Clyde, so it was a particular pleasure to find this short feature with him at the top of the cast list. Lucille Gleason and Roger Imhof are a married couple with four almost-adult children. They're not particularly rich, but he's working and they own their own house and have his paycheck to live on. Imhof loves to belong to various lodges, and at one of them he latches onto a good-sounding speculation, a gold mine open only to lodge members. He wants to do well by his family, but Lucille doesn't wish to risk their little capital. Enter Andy Clyde, Lucille's father. He's just sold his junk business and has come to stay.

When Imhof puts a mortgage on the house to raise the capital, Lucille is upset. Then, suddenly, the mine pays off and money starts to flow in. But with great wealth comes an entirely different set of problems.

The movie is full of low-key bickering and the sort of mild, homespun humor that made Andy Clyde's Columbia shorts so much fun. He had been playing this elderly character for ten years at this point, first at Sennett, even though at the time he made this, he was 44 years old and four years younger than the woman playing his daughter!

It might have been the entry to a starring feature career for Andy, but alas, this was the last movie produced by Chesterfield, one of the sturdier Poverty Row companies. It seems to have disappeared into Republic Pictures, and although Andy continued his Columbia short subject series until 1956, played comic sidekicks in eighty features, and continued acting on TV into the mid-1960s -- he was a regular on THE REAL MCCOYS, when he had actually caught up to his character's age -- he never got that starring role. But he made a lot of funny movies, and this is a good one.