BOOTLEG FILES 818: “In the Devildog House” (1934 short starring Clark and McCullough).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It fell through the cracks.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
Yes, the spotlight is back on the comedy team of Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough – and why not? For too long, their films have been overlooked – to the point that many of them are either lost or are in archives and cannot be easily accessed.
Their 1934 romp “In the Devildog House” is an example of the neglect that burdened their legacy. The only easily available copy to view is a dismal print on YouTube that is blurry and has thick lines occasionally running vertically down the image. But even a cruddy-looking Clark and McCullough film is better than none.
“In the Devildog House” opens in the apartment of an oversized Marine named Smith (played by Tom Kennedy) and his wife Jennie (Dorothy Granger). The Marine tells his wife he is going off for two weeks of sharpshooting training, but she thinks he is having an affair with the blonde secretary of her neighbor Alan Fun (Bud Jamison), who runs a novelty toy company.
After Smith departs, Jennie calls the start-up detective agency of Titwillow and Blodgett (Clark and McCullough), who are passing the time by fiddling with a strange grandfather clock. However, Jennie is enjoying the company of Alan Fun while her husband is away – but the Production Code was already in place by this time, so their rendezvous is limited to coffee in the kitchen.
Before Smith leaves with his fellow Marines, he stops by the detective agency to hire the sleuths because he suspects his wife is unfaithful. Titwillow is out but Blodgett unilaterally agrees to take his case.
The detectives visit Fun’s novelty toy company and he assaults them with a variety of nasty joke gadgets including a telephone that sprays talcum powder, a bench that collapses when people sit on it and a tub of water that showers the duo when they exit the office. “Don’t get sore, boys, it’s all in fun!” laughs Fun when he abuses the detectives.
As luck would have it, the Marines’ training exercise is cancelled and Smith returns to his apartment building. Titwillow and Blodgett are in his apartment with Jennie, and Blodgett is sent out to get more ginger ale. Blodgett passes Smith in the lobby and confirms the Marine’s suspicions – but then mentions that he’s working on another case in the building.
Smith returns to the apartment, and Titwillow fears he will be mistaken as Jennie’s lover. His attempt to hide in a trunk is futile, but he manages to talk the Marine out of killing him with a stunt that will show Jennie has been faithful. Fun then comes in from across the hall and Titwillow hides him in a large trunk – and then convinces Smith to throw the trunk out the window.
Titwillow and Blodgett watch from the sidewalk as the trunk falls several stories and lands among some garbage cans. Fun angrily calls the duo “You dirty double crossers,” but Titwillow reminds him that “it’s all in fun” – and the duo walk away whistling and tipping their hats to the camera.
“In the Devildog House” is not as frenetic as some of Clark and McCullough’s best work, but it moves at a jolly pace and it represents an old-school slamming-door style of comedy that disappeared years ago. The film percolates in amusing bits, such as Clark and McCullough singing and dancing a riff on “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” and Clark nonchalantly taking Jennie’s purse for money to send McCullough out to buy root beer.
Many film lovers have complained that Clark was often too dominant, to the point of diluting McCullough’s presence to a sidekick rather than an equal partner. That happens here in a scene when McCullough is absent (to get ginger ale) while Clark and Tom Kennedy share the screen. The scene brings out Clark’s vices – overplaying the comedy, as if he was still on the vaudeville stage and he was performing to the last row of the balcony – but, mercifully, Kennedy was an able straight man and he keeps the scene from going awry.
Also worth noting is Bud Jamison, the genial roly-poly character actor who displays a wonderfully malevolent streak when he is torturing Clark and McCullough with his practical joke toys and gadgets. If you only know Jamison as the foil to the Three Stooges’ mayhem, this film can affirm he could dish it out as well as taking it.
Recently, two long-unseen Clark and McCullough films – their 1931 Oscar-nominated “Scratch as Catch Can” and the 1935 “Flying Down to Zero” – emerged on YouTube in pristine prints courtesy of the British Film Institute (BFI) and the BBC. “In the Devildog House” is part of the BFI collection, and maybe a clean copy of the film can be licensed, too. Until then, we have to be content with this presentation:
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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