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pkman-35264
Reviews
Beginner's Luck (1935)
Beginner's luck
A cute tale of a child finding out his stage mother had signed him up to recite at a local theater. His pals offer a solution to boo and ruin his act with noisemakers and peashooters. He has a change of mind when he meets a nice girl who needs the prize to buy her special dress and she bombed her act from fright. He asks his mom to tell his buds he wants to win. She delivers the wrong message and the kids think he still wants to loose. When he steps on stage they assail him with a barrage and crazy sounds. He uses his shield to block the peas. His mom sees this and waves for him to come off and end this madness. The The theaters MC is standing next to her and sees the audience laughing and waves for Spanky to go on. A very shocked mother taps the MC saying " they're laughing at him". Then she demands he be taken off. Only to be laughed at. In her last attempt she goes behind the back curtain with a pole to pull him off. She hooks him and is pulling him off but she is being pulled out. The grandmother sees an opportunity and asks the MC can she raise the back curtain and explaining it would stop the show. The man gets it and knows the crowd is going to love it. The mother has him close when the grandmother raises the curtain catching the mother's dress. The audience loves this and start howling at her as she tries to unhook her dress. No matter what she does the dress rises slowly. Spanky is laying on the stage seeing his mom is helpless. The curtain does up to the top ripping her dress off and up she is thrown to kneeling on the floor on her knees in her slip. Spanky rushes a prop in front of her to hide her but it has a body of a squatting animal without a head but the mother's head fits perfectly.
The short isn't in the top 10 but probably in the secondary top 10. It starts off slow without many laughs. But really gets good with Spanky's stage act. The act just keeps getting funnier as it goes on. The mother's rescue attempt is good watching her stick the pole into a socket. The grandmother seeing a hook dangling off the curtain. The unexpected catching of her dress is the best part , seeing this stage mother being totally humiliated.