by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was an archive.org
download of a 1931 RKO Pathé comedy short called Dumb Dicks, a truly weird 19-minute movie that from the start of
it — an establishing shot of the nameplate of the Lafayette National Bank
(“Lafayette isn’t a nation,”
Charles joked) followed by the sounds of gunfire coming from a criminal gang in
a number of cars firing so many shots so rapidly and in so many different
directions it seems like they’re there less to rob the bank than to assault it,
and just when you’re wondering how a scene so brutal got into a film both the genre classification and the credits themselves claimed
was a comedy, suddenly we see a white car parked in front of the bank and our
two “heroes,” private detectives Benny Rubin and Harry Gribbon (like Laurel and
Hardy, the stars of this comedy are using their own names for the names of
their characters), sleeping through the whole thing. At one point an errant
shot wakes up Rubin, but Gribbon quickly convinces him it’s just an automobile
backfiring and he goes back to sleep — until it dawns on his pathetic excuse
for a consciousness that people are
actually firing machine-gun bullets in his general direction and they’d better
do something, fast. They switch on their radio, which is tuned to the police
frequency, and thus learn that there’s a robbery in progress at the Lafayette
National Bank. So they turn to the nearest passer-by and ask where the
Lafayette National Bank is — and only then do they learn that they’ve been
parked in front of it, asleep, all this time.
They invade the bank with their
own gun and, naturally, both the bank customers and the real police think
they’re part of the robbery, though they talk themselves out of being arrested
by promising to catch the real crooks and recover the $100,000 that’s been
stolen. They trace the gang to a lavish (or at least as lavish as a Pathé
Comedy production budget could make it) house in the country owned by Jabez
(Ivan Linow), head of the gang, and knowing that Jabez is a sucker for
fortune-tellers they decide to disguise themselves as such and affect Turkish
accents (even though they have no idea what a Turkish accent sounds like) and
Turkish drag — only Jabez decides that their false whiskers would look better
if he switches them. From then on the film is an elaborate chase through the
house, which comes complete with secret panels and trick entrances and exits,
with Benny and Harry thinking they’ve trapped the crooks only to find that
they’re the ones who are trapped (there’s a deliciously funny sequence in which
Benny thinks he’s tied up the crooks, and Harry says, “Yes, but you’ve tied me up with them!”), until after 19 minutes of all the
complications writer Ewart Adamson (he’s just credited with “story,” which
usually means someone else wrote the actual script, but he’s the only writer listed) and whichever gag people worked on
this film could think of, credibly if not brilliantly directed by Ralph Cedar,
the actual police show up, rescue Our Heroes from the gang, take back the money
and absolve our dumb dicks of any guilt for the theft.
The intent of supervisor
Lew Lipton and his crew seems to have been to take two Jewish-ethnic humorists
and see if they could be turned into a Jewish version of Laurel and Hardy, and
while one could readily imagine this film being funnier if the real Laurel and Hardy were in it (let’s face it, they
could do a lot more variations on
stupidity gags than Rubin and Gribbon could!), this one’s quite good and shows
signs that its makers had studied the masters and, shall we say, appropriated material: one scene blatantly ripped off the
sequence in Buster Keaton’s The Navigator in which he arms a toy cannon to fire it at the baddies, only his foot
is caught up in the pull-cord for the cannon and it always seems to arrange
itself so it’s aimed at him instead
of the bad guys (a sequence that got even funnier when Keaton recycled it
himself in The General with a full-sized cannon!).
