Just What I Needed

...and that is an abundance of exaggerated but familiar situations. This one simply has too many things that cannot happen for it to stand up to Smith's best work.

This short is about Christmas gifts that are either useless or cause more problems than they solve. Here Pete Smith short stalwart Dave O'Brien is once again the mute star of the show as a man who has received a bunch of bum Christmas gifts. One is a tasteless mobile whose theme is income tax. Whoever came up with the design of this should have gotten a raise from MGM. Another is a tool chest from the wife, but there is nothing to fix. O'Brien winds up destroying a chair trying to fix it. Then he buys a locked chest at an auction. Unable to open the lock he decides to....drop it from high place and bust it open? Wouldn't this have been the time to use the saw in the wife's toolkit and bust the lock that way? I knew there was a producer named Marx that worked at the studio at the time, but I don't think his first name was Groucho!

There are other gifts and situations, but they involve things that are probably a scientific impossibility. However the ever expressive David O'Brien is always worth watching.