User Reviews

This one needs a bit of explaining, as most people watching this short film today will have a hard time understanding it. Soon after the film begins, Edgar finds some gold in his attic and the guy working on his roof tells him he could go to jail for having it!! This is because President Franklin Roosevelt has actually campaigned Congress to make gold ownership illegal in order to force people off the gold standard as well as to try to get more currency into circulation. This context is not explained in the film and I am sure most viewers would just be baffled as to why he needs to hide this treasure.

Because it was not illegal to find gold and sell it, Edgar and the roofer decide to pretend to find it buried in his yard. The only problem is, where Kennedy buried it happens to be in his neighbor's yard--as the property boundary was apparently wrong. And, to make it worst, the neighbor is a violent nut who shoots at Edgar whenever he tries to come in his yard. So, the two decide to tunnel to the treasure! This is a very strange plot--and I certainly can't think of another film like it! I was happy to see that this film was NOT one Edgar Kennedy made with Florence Lake. They had made a lot of domestic comedies together and the DVD I bought had mostly their films on it--which is a shame, as Lake's character was among the most annoying in film history! Instead, Vivian Oakland plays his wife it's much more watchable. Plus, even though the plot is weird, it is kind of funny and worth seeing. Not a great film, but a good one.

Many of us would be fortunate to find some sort of treasure buried in our attic or basement, whether it be old comic books, old movies, or even ancient currency which quadrupled in value over the last few centuries. On the other hand, you may find something that appears valuable, but is actually worthless and can cause you no end of problems in trying to get rid of it. Guess which of those scenarios will befall Edgar Kennedy in today's adventure? Well, when Edgar sets out to do anything, fate will usually come along and throw a monkeywrench in his plans. It all started when he was trying to plant a flower garden, and Vivian was heading out into town for a long day of shopping. She sends Edgar up to the attic to find some frames for the pictures she's going to buy... knowing Vivian, she'll probably buy a painting some guy off the street made a week ago claiming it to be from Picasso. Anyway, while Edgar roots around in the attic, he comes upon a small cup filled with gold coins. Hey, that's something you don't see everyday. In astonishment, he stands upright and crashes his head through the roof, altering the nosy painter who was up there not working. The painter is played by Bill Franey, who usually played Edgar's father in-law in the shorts where Vivien Oakland was his wife, but for some reason, he's not that character here, though he might as well be because this painter is just as antagonistic, snotty and annoying as Pops. When he discovers the treasure Edgar unearthed, he tried to make it sound like he was Al Capone and would be looking at a hefty fine and lengthy jail time for "hoarding" gold coins. Now, as another reviewer on here pointed out, the reason they make a big to-do about the coins is that back in the '30s, FDR outlawed gold coins and mandated U. S. dollars as the only accepted form of currency. It's when we got off the Gold Standard, and ask your grandparents what that was. So Edgar's coins were apparently worth nothing, and the painter was all set on turning him in like he were a hardened criminal, and of course gullible Edgar panics, even though he only found the coins, he wasn't hoarding them, and even if he were, so what? He would only get in trouble if he tried to spend them. It's like after the Civil War, the authorities didn't round up people who still had Confederate money, just so long as they didn't try to spend it. Heck, after 1865 that Confederate money was still put to good use, mostly in outhouses, but I digress. The bully of a painter keeps threatening to report Edgar, despite the given the circumstances I've laid out above, Edgar would not face any jail time, though in this universe, he always seems to have a run in with the cops, so they'd probably arrest him just for sneezing in their direction. Also, is it me or does the painter seem all too eager to take those coins off Edgar's hands? If they're useless, why does he want them? Who knows? But now they're presented with a problem: how do they get rid of the unlawful currency and not make it look like Edgar hoarded? The painter comes up with a convoluted plan of burying them in the yard, and then have witnesses around when they dig them up. Yeah, I can't see that going wrong at all. You know, Edgar, if you had any brains, you'd call that senile painter's bluff and just put the coins back in the attic. However, I've seen over 20 of these shorts and I can confirm that Edgar (the character, not the actor) has no brain whatsoever.

Where does he plant his soon-to-be buried treasure? His front yard? Backyard? No, that would be too easy. He selects a plot on the other side of the driveway near his neighbor's house where he had been planting petunias, as apparently it's just before the property line. Now here is where fate decides to play yet another cruel joke on Edgar, for right at that exact moment, a bunch of men carry a pre-assembled fence and set it down right on top of the burial plot. As expected, a surveyor announces there was a mistake about the property lines and has now been corrected. To add insult to injury, the neighbor, Jones, is an extremely abrasive man who warns Edgar not to set foot on his property, though he is nice enough to give him his petunias back... by way of pulling them up and chucking them at him. I think Jones must be some sort of gangster, judging by his appearance, mannerisms and oh, when Edgar foolishly tries to climb over the fence, rather than just walk around it, Jones takes a shot at him... with a gun. Ha ha ha, he's living next door to a homicidal maniac, how funny. But no, you know what's even funnier? The painter had gone off to round up witnesses for when Edgar was to dig up the gold, but screw that, they all brought picks and shovels of their own to dig it up themselves, and they quickly start excavating Edgar's front lawn! Well, they do have a point, he SHOULD have buried it there, instead of next to John Dillinger's house. How exactly did the painter entice all those people to come? Well, all he said was that there was a million dollars in gold buried there, he didn't say anything about worthless coins, so I guess all those men showed up to try and reenact the Gold Rush... and not the one with Chaplin. Edgar rounds up the human gophers and shows them where the gold is buried, but when they tried jumping the fence, Hand Gun Kelly takes potshots at them. Is he unaware that attempted murder is a much bigger offense than trespassing? They should call the cops on HIM. But oh no, then they'd find Edgar's gold and he'd have to go to jail, so forget that. Well, what now? Easy, if you can't go over, go under. The painter and Edgar grab some shovels and start tunneling their way to the gold underground, or rather Edgar does all the digging and the painter does all the lazing, although he was hiding the dirt. Yeah, he was hiding the dirt they were digging so the psycho next door couldn't tell what they were up to. Does that make sense? Not now, but it will pay off in the end. Anyway, they hit a rock, so naturally the answer would be to blast it. The painter rigs up some explosives and tries to test them on Edgar, because having only one psycho in this short wasn't enough. As they go back up to the house to prepare the explosion, Vivian comes home, and guess what she found? The cup of gold coins in the front yard. How did she find them, you may wonder? Well, back when Jones was unearthing Edgar's flowers and throwing them, one of them had been buried in the coin cup, so that got thrown back into his yard, it's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment. Ha ha ha, all that digging was for nothing. As for the hidden dirt, they find it in the piano, and even piled in the bedroom, because comedy. Edgar chases the painter from his house, but not before he blows the dynamite, producing a large crater in the yard and making Edgar fall down a hole. Ha ha ha, what an evil man.

Well, what can I say about Dumb's the Word, besides that being the perfect title for this short? The whole idea was just crazy: Edgar finding worthless coins, that painter trying to make him out to be a criminal, the whole hackneyed plan of burying them, the psycho with a gun next door, trying to tunnel under the fence, it was madness. The painter is actually a much worse character than Pops, as he's even worse than Brother. Ironically, this short was remade in 1948 under the title Dig That Gold, which has the same premise: Edgar finding worthless gold coins and Brother trying to procure them for himself. At least in that short, it's later revealed that the coins he found were just props for a stage show, so the pay off was much better. Like I said before, just having gold coins in your attic is not a crime, it would only have any negative repercussions if you tried to spend them. Different types of currencies have come and gone over the centuries: gold coins, Confederate currency, and even today we have ways of paying for things electronically. Heck, going by the logic of this short, people who have coin collections would be considered criminals. It's ridiculous. And speaking of criminals, Edgar's neighbor certainly was one. There's defending your property from intruders and then there's just being a maniac who takes potshots at people who so much as stick a foot over your fence like it's a freakin' carnival shooting gallery. Jones was played by Eddie Dunn who, along with Kennedy, got his start with the Keystone Kops in the silent days. In closing, do I recommend Dumb's the Word? Well, if you're a fan of Edgar Kennedy and you know your history of American currency and you're well versed in the decreased value of the gold standard, then you should like this one. Otherwise, it will just leave you scratching your head and wondering why every single person depicted in this short wasn't sent to a loony bin.

I guess gold in the Alattic wasn't worth much in 1937 because for some reason, Edgar Kennedy and the roofer decide to bury it in the yard and they choose right where the property line ends, putting it literally on the other side just as his nasty neighbor puts a fence up. Edgar digs a tunnel underneath the yard to retrieve the gold, and that creates a lot of problems. Two of Edgar's main problems in his series was that he either had his nasty in-laws around or interfering neighbor or friend who set him on the wrong direction, and that is the case here. This is a pretty convoluted and messy little short, amusing on a physical aspect, but annoying overall. The gold he's trying to retrieve ends up being more problems than it's worth, and it's obvious that he's going to end up ruining more than just his clothes and trying to get it back. I'm glad this was only two reels because any more than that, I would have to refer to this as fool's gold.