Kino's Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin DVD collects 11 of Benchley's shorts, but it's not exactly a best-of compilation. Its two best films would certainly make any Benchley "greatest hits" set. Those are The Treasurer's Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp, both from 1928. These two shorts made for Fox set the tone for Benchley's films, with him cast as an ineffectual expert.
In those first two shorts, Benchley addresses assembled civic groups. His ineffectualness is in his delivery. The Treasurer's Report is a routine Benchley had performed onstage and at parties for several years, and it's a choice nugget of absurdity. Benchley's uncomfortable expert knocks over his water glass, doesn't know where to put his hands (unintentionally undoing his bowtie with them at one point) and verbally strands himself in dead-end sentences that he can't finish. It's in this and The Sex Life of the Polyp where you feel Benchley's potential influence of later verbal absurdists such as Peter Cook and fellow New Englanders Bob & Ray.
Polyp places Benchley the expert in front of a ladies' organization in which he talks of the microbes' mating dance, wryly noting "The courting season begins on the 10th of March and extends on through February, leaving about 10 days for general overhauling and repairs." Benchley's second short includes plenty of amusing sides like this, as well as the expert sheepishly pussyfooting around any direct mention of sexual activity.
Benchley made several more shorts for Fox, but his film work turned more prolific with his series at MGM, starting with 1935's Oscar-winning How to Sleep. Rather than presenting Benchley's expert as a fatuous bumbler, these one-reelers generally undercut his expertise in a different way. That was by also casting Benchley as the poor sap dealing with life's frustrations in the cut-ins dramatizing the dilemmas that Benchley's narration introduces.
Alas, Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin includes none of Benchley's 1935-1940 MGM one-reelers. Aside from the two Fox shorts mentioned above, it draws its material from his 1940-42 Paramount one-reelers, which are not as highly regarded as his earlier work. The nine Paramount shorts are a spotty lot, often recycling ideas, as in Waiting for Baby and The Forgotten Man, two shorts that mine similar gags about the "left-out man," an expectant father in the first and a father of the bride in the second (whichever one you watch second will feel like total rehash). The Trouble with Husbands might be the best of the bunch, with oblivious Joe Doakes, the Benchley character in the cut-ins, acting out all of the irritating behavior that peeves his wife (Ruth Lee, Benchley's perennial onscreen wife). Crime Control, in which Joe battles such everyday nuisances as uncooperative window shades, newspapers and bowties, is another memorable entry here.
But much of Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin is not top-shelf Benchley. For instance, Keeping in Shape and How to Take a Vacation are undernourished, one-joke affairs that can't even sustain 10 minutes before petering out. And the disc also includes unremarkable shorts by fellow Manhattan intellectuals Alexander Woollcott (who comes off like a pompous jerk in 1934's Mr. W's Little Game) and Donald Ogden Stewart, who does a similar bumbling-expert schtick as early Benchley in two 1929 shorts, semi-amusingly in Humorous Flights, which sure comes off like a The Sex Life of the Polyp knock-off.
Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin at least earns points for being the first DVD of Benchley shorts, and for having those two early shorts. But be prepared for less than stellar visual quality in The Treasurer's Report. A major obstruction has somehow gotten in the picture during the short's last two minutes. It looks as if a twig is lain across Benchley or one of the superbugs from Them! has suddenly attacked. There must be a better print of this short out there somewhere.
For more information about Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin, visit Kino International. To order Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin, go to TCM Shopping.
by Paul Sherman
