On the Loose

This movie is very light to watch and has some nice humor in it. It also provides us with a good view of how fairs looked like in the '30's. It was especially fun and weird to see that the adults were having just as much fun as children on the fair.

There basically of course is very little story present but there are more than enough sequences and humor present to make us forget that. The characters in the movie are also really good and strong enough to carry the movie. Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd formed a pretty good comical duo. Claud Allister was also good and quite fun to watch in the movie, as an over-the-top English chap.

There also are surprising quite a few sexual-references present, even some homosexual-references, which was all quite daring for its time.

At the very end of the movie we also see two very well known boys, none other than Laurel & Hardy, who want to ask the girls out.

Good fun, directed by Mr. Hal Roach himself.

7/10

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ON THE LOOSE

Aspect ratio: 1.37:1

Sound format: Mono

(Black and white - Short film)

Two young party girls (ZaSu Pitts and Thelma Todd) are romanced by a couple of clueless Brits (John Loder and Claud Allister) who take them out to their least favorite place on earth - Coney Island - where they suffer a series of adventures and indignities.

Part of an attempt by producer-director Hal Roach to recreate the successful Laurel and Hardy formula with other performers, this lumbering comedy is long on sight gags and short on laughs. Pitts and Todd - neither of them strangers to this kind of material - fail to strike many sparks as a potential 'comedy team', and the scenario is both obvious and heavy-handed. There's a surprising amount of risqué material, much of it revolving around gay stereotypes: Roach regular Billy Gilbert camps it up as an effeminate haute couturier, much embarrassed whenever he tries to describe the manner in which his dresses emphasize various parts of a woman's anatomy (however, a gruff aside to his staff reveals the campery to be a mere façade), and Allister plays his Brit character as a queenish fop, caught up in a running gag which finds him falling repeatedly into the arms of a young woman and her hot-tempered boyfriend, and he's more than happy to accommodate *both* of them! Laurel and Hardy make an unbilled appearance at the very end of the movie, and there's a brief cameo by frequent L&H co-star Charlie Hall.

The comedy team of of Pitts and Todd find themselves unable to get a date to anywhere but Coney Island but feel they are headed uptown when a Euro bon vivant in his flashy car splashes them with mud. He springs for new duds and asks them out on a date with his pal to where else but.

The girls are their usually entertainingly clumsy clownish selves but this time with a decided advantage over their cad pursuers. The girls and the rubes play well off each other harmlessly and the pair have a fun scene in the dark bonding over past jaunts to Coney but Billy Gilbert's effeminate dress designer is outrageously hilarious especially if you are familiar with his extensive career of playing blustery, frustrated characters. With a surprise ending regarding their last pair of dates suggesting they go to you guessed it makes On the loose a pretty tight short.

On the Loose (1931)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Zasu Pitts and Thelma Todd are tired of all their dates taking them to Coney Island. They finally meet a couple gentlemen who they think highly of but the surprise date turns out to be another trip to Coney Island. Pitts and Todd really don't bring too much to this film but things pick up once they arrive at Coney Island. The biggest laugh comes from the cameo by Laurel and Hardy.

Along Came Auntie (1926)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Screwball comedy has a woman wanting to inherit $100,000 from her aunt so she must pretend to be married to her first husband (Oliver Hardy), which doesn't sit too well with her new husband. There's nothing overly funny or original here but the rather violent fighting gets a few laughs and Hardy is as energetic as ever.

I've long known about this Hal Roach-directed short because of its inclusion in a book about a famous comedy team but the actual stars of this one were Thelma Todd and Zazu Pitts, a female version of that other famous comedy team. In this one, the girls are tired of another date to Coney Island. The next day they get splashed mud by a car that happened to pass them by. A man sees them and offers to buy them new clothes. He then gets a date with one of them and offers his friend for the other. I'll stop there and just say this was quite a treat to watch especially when we see where they end up in and also the reveal of that famous comedy team when it's almost all over... P. S. What a treat to also see such familiar faces like Billy Gilbert and Charlie Hall here!