His Big Minute

Released in May 1929, HIS BIG MINUTE is one of Lloyd Hamilton's earliest sound comedies. Like DON'T BE NERVOUS, which was also in Hamilton's 1929 series of "talking" comedy shorts, this also opens with a glee club vocal heard during the opening credits, although in this case men dressed in Western garb are singing "Ragtime Cowboy Joe." While the setting of this film seems to be a small Western town, Hamilton is dressed in his normal manner, with cap. At first, he wanders into a saloon and disrupts a card game, causing one guy to lose a large bet. He then stumbles into another building while escaping the card players' wrath, and he knocks down two men who were robbing a general store. He saves a lady's life by doing this, and she takes him home to meet her Father and two brothers. Guess who the two brothers are? Whether in the saloon, or at the home of the family, or in the bedroom scene where Hamilton has to sleep with the two brothers and one pretends to be a sleepwalking psychotic, there are a lot of laughs, although the sound on this one is a bit rough and over-recorded, and it seems as though most of the players speak their lines too loud. These flaws did NOT appear in shorts in this series made just a few months later, so we'll credit it to the bugs in the early sound era. By the way, as I said about DON'T BE NERVOUS, there is nothing static about HIS BIG MINUTE nor is it leaden as so many early sound films are. Available on an old Parrotville VHS compilation from about 20 years ago.