Tidbits for April 2023

A seltzer bottle spray-down is tried-and-true comedy. 

 Rigadin Doesn't Like Friday the 13th (1911)

Monkey Business (1952)

Max Linder gets a worse drenching by a hose in Max's First Job (1910).

Laurel and Hardy were wet through most of Towed in a Hole (1932).

A popular commedia dell'arte routine, Lazzo of the Hands Behind the Back, is presented on a 1972 episode of the Australian comedy series Aunty Jack.

More commedia dell'arte humor is provided in this clip from The Other Woman (2014).

Here is yet more proof that Frank McHugh was a master at comic tipsiness.

It never fails that the unconscious woman routine will turn up in one of my Tidbit collections. This one is from I Motorizzati (1962).

Similarly, I am never short of dog mommy images. 

The Last Warning (1929)

The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1945) 

One Sunday Afternoon (1948) 

Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Here are more examples of the often-used fireplace shot that Alfred Hitchcock and Billy Wilder so drolly decried. 

Strangers in the Night (1944) 

The Depraved (1957) 

Burn, Witch, Burn! (1962) 

The Most Wonderful Evening of My Life (1972) 

I wanted Midjourney to show Hitchcock photographed in the same sort of way and glaring in disapproval at the camera. But, no matter how I described the shot, the program was unable to produce the image that I wanted. The shot was simply too crazy for the program to understand. 

So, I settled on a conventional shots of Hitchcock sitting snugly beside a warm fireplace.

Billy Bevan plays a prim butler in The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942).

Douglas Fairbanks walks up the side of a wall in When the Clouds Roll By (1919). I do not know how I overlooked this scene when I wrote my article "Up a Wall." 

I always enjoy a comedian doing battle with an inanimate object.  This scene from Towed in a Hole (1932) shows Stan Laurel at odds with a hose.

 June Clyde contemplates her distorted mirror reflection in Treasure Hunt (1952).

Here is a young and lovely pre-I Love Lucy Vivian Vance with Eve Arden.

Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu are a perfect comedy team in The Fugitives (1986).

Let me end today with a few random images.

A less bitter scene in Bitter Rice (1949)

An unhappy Naomi Watts in We Don't Live Here Anymore (2004)

Roger Pigaut and Odette Joyeux in Douce (1943)

Something has shocked Paul Harvey and Marjorie Weaver in The Man Who Wouldn't Die (1942).

Toto in I pompieri di Viggiu (1949)