Sharps and Flats

Sharps and Flats (1928)

*** (out of 4)

The vaudeville husband and wife team of Jimmy Conlin and Myrtle Glass get their shot at the movies in this 9-minute Vitaphone short showing one of their acts. I've seen quite a few of these early Vitaphone talkies and the quality is always hit and miss but this here was one of the best I've seen. I thought the chemistry between Conlin and Glass was something that clearly jumped off the screen and while so many vaudeville acts just couldn't cut in on the big screen, these two here were clearly made for it. I thought the entire act was pretty fast and funny and especially the scenes where Glass pretty much beats the fire out of Conlin. One great sequence has her pushing him around so hard to play the piano that the majority of his clothes get ripped off. Another good sequence happens early on as Glass goes into singing "You'll Never Be," which was a pretty good number about why she won't marry him. Fans of the Vitaphone shorts will certainly want to seek this one here out.

Jimmy Conlin -- best remembered as a minor player in Preston Sturges' stock company in the 1940s -- had a long career in vaudeville, appearing with wife Myrtle Glass.

This is a filmed record of that act and unlike a lot of Vitaphone shorts of the period which have no movement and little in the way of good jokes and delivery, this one is very funny, with a roving camera, some stooges disrupting events behind the curtain and a wild set of visual gags: as Myrtle tries to sing "Morning Noon and Night", Jimmy, as her pugnacious accompanist, acts like a combination of Victor Borge trying not to play the piano and Chico Marx, trying to figure out how to end this song.

You can see a lot of the movement to 'crazy comedy' in the early thirties, the violence and non-sequiturs of the Marx Brothers, Wheeler and Woolsey and the like. Vitaphone made a lot of these movies which were no more than a performance of a vaudeville act and a lot of them are a waste of time. This one is not. See it if you can

Many of the old Vitaphone sound shorts have been recently restored and they are a great collection of old musical and vaudeville numbers. In many cases the only examples of these acts you could ever see and hear. However, in a few cases, perhaps it would have been better had they not restored a few of them--or perhaps saved them for last. This is definitely the case with "Conlin & Glass in Sharps and Flats". It's an incredibly bad act--one that makes you wonder how the pair managed to find employment doing this act!

To give you a bit of background, Jimmy Conlin and Myrtle Glass were a married couple who traveled the country doing musical comedy. I have no idea how much Myrtle actually got to sing, as Jimmy pretty much bumbled around on the piano--a bit like Victor Borge decades later. Unfortunately, Myrtle died in her 40s and Jimmy went on to a long career playing bit characters--particularly in Preston Sturges films. He died almost two decades later.

As far as the film goes, Myrtle is mostly trying to sing a song entitled "Morning, Noon and Night" and Jimmy keeps bumbling about the piano in a random and seemingly unfunny manner. Perhaps they were a laugh riot on stage---here they just seemed to make up for the lack of humor and singing by being loud.

By the way, Jimmy sports a pair of large spectacles and looks a lot like Robert Woolsey (of Wheeler and Woolsey fame). I've actually seen several clients with a similar getup and assume that must have been a popular type of character on the vaudeville circuit.