BOOTLEG FILES 844: “Hiss and Yell” (1946 Oscar-nominated comedy short starring Vera Vague and Emil Sitka).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: The rights holder will not make it available.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.
In the late 1930s, comic actress Barbara Jo Allen invented the character Vera Vague for a radio show. This character was a chatterbox, featherbrained spinster who was always in pursuit of a man. Audiences quickly embraced the character, and her appeal was so strong that Allen adopted Vera Vague as her professional name.
Vera Vague was ubiquitous on radio during the 1940s, and the film studios also began to seek her out. She starred in a series of short comedies at Columbia Pictures, making her one of the very few women to headline her own film series during Hollywood’s Golden Era. The Columbia shorts starring Vera Vague were briefly syndicated on television in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but then fell out of circulation. Today, the casual film lover either never heard of Vera Vague or may have just seen her name in a film history book without having seen her work.
The 1946 Vera Vague short “Hiss and Yell” is available online, albeit in an unauthorized YouTube posting. The film is notable at two levels – it received an Academy Award nomination (one of two Vera Vague shorts to be honored with Academy recognition), and it marked the film debut of the beloved comic character actor Emil Sitka (in a small unbilled role). As for the film itself – well, having never seen any of the other shorts in this series, I can’t say if it marks a screen apex or nadir. On its own standalone terms, I was neither amused nor impressed.
“Hiss and Tell” starts off on the wrong foot with Vera packing a surplus amount of luggage when her front door rings. A porter is calling, asking if she has a trunk. Vera is indignant, squawking “What do I look like, an elephant?” – except she realizes what the porter is after and then chastises him for calling her an elephant, which he obviously didn’t do.
Vera is packing so she can visit a distant friend, who is hosting a Red Cross drive. She closes and locks her trunk with part of her robe stuck in the luggage, and her gown gets torn off when the porter carts it off, revealing the silly woman in a black negligee.
Vera is then walking down the street carrying a hat box and several small bags when she looks into the window of an apartment building and views a silhouette of a man cutting off a woman’s head with a razor. She is shocked and drops her hat box, which she then steps on and drags along with her feet as she tries to locate a police officer. She finds a cop and tells him what she saw – he goes to investigate and discovers the man is a magician and the decapitated woman was only a mannequin.
Vera gets on a train to visit her friend and guess who is on the train? Yes, the magician. And the magician is carrying the head of his mannequin in a small bag that is identical to one that Vera has. Through contrivances that only exist in movies, Vera thinks the head in the bag is a human noggin, and when a jar of jam opens and drips on her hand she theorizes that it is the blood of the supposed decapitated woman.
Vera beats a hasty exit from the train with her belongings, but (of course) she takes the wrong bag and discovers the mannequin’s head. She tries to get rid of the bag – at one point, throwing it over hedges and into the lap of a drunk gardener (the great Emil Sitka), who throws it back to her. She winds up at her friend’s home and can you guess who else is there? Of course, the magician, who is frantic because he needs the head for his act.
“Hiss and Yell” was written by Felix Adler, a longtime comedy writer who penned scripts for Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, and for Columbia’s short subject kings The Three Stooges. Adler was the man responsible for what might the funniest dialogue exchange in Stooges (and, for that matter, movie) history – the “take off you hat” segment of “Disorder in the Court.” In “Hiss and Yell,” however, Adler had a clinker full of labored slapstick and annoying Vera Vague babbling. Jules White, another behind-the-camera staple of the Stooges flicks, directed and produced this short, but he couldn’t create cinematic alchemy – rather than comedy gold, “Hiss and Yell” is just a clump of lead.
As an aside, the magician was played by Barton Yarborough, who was Barbara Jo Allen’s husband at the time. He is effective as the oleaginous showman, but it is not his vehicle and he is an unlucky passenger in this dull ride.
If any reader has access to other (and better) Vera Vague comedies, please share them with me. I would hate to imagine this was the best of the bunch.
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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