Before he spent twenty years playing a twitchy, warbly-voiced, mildly incompetent Dagwood Bumstead, Arthur Lake spent his youth in the movies playing a twitchy,warbly-voiced, mildly incompetent young man. Earlier, in the silent era, he had to do without the voice, but it was the same character all the way through.
In this one, an episode in the Universal Studios series called "Horace in Hollywood", Lake dates up Gertrude Messinger. While waiting for her outside a movie theater, he is handed a baby by its mother with a request to mind it while she goes offscreen. Naturally, Gertrude thinks the baby is Lake's. So does Glen Cavender, who seems to be in about forty percent of all short comedies in this period, as a beat cop.
Most of the humor in this one-reel comedy consists of Lake's comic reactions, which were the same ones he used as Dagwood, He had a real talent for this style of physical comedy, assuming that his audience had not tired of the daddy-is-a-dope trope. Well, as of the writing of this review, they still haven't. So you should find this a competent if uninspired late silent comedy.
In this one, an episode in the Universal Studios series called "Horace in Hollywood", Lake dates up Gertrude Messinger. While waiting for her outside a movie theater, he is handed a baby by its mother with a request to mind it while she goes offscreen. Naturally, Gertrude thinks the baby is Lake's. So does Glen Cavender, who seems to be in about forty percent of all short comedies in this period, as a beat cop.
Most of the humor in this one-reel comedy consists of Lake's comic reactions, which were the same ones he used as Dagwood, He had a real talent for this style of physical comedy, assuming that his audience had not tired of the daddy-is-a-dope trope. Well, as of the writing of this review, they still haven't. So you should find this a competent if uninspired late silent comedy.
