The Paramount Comedy Shorts 1928-1942- Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin

Product Description In this special collection of fourteen rare short films, Kino on Video pays homage to the great American Satirist Robert Benchley and two other witty literati who shared his company at the Hotel Algonquin's legendary round table and personified the sophisticated literary scene of New York in the 1920s and 30s. From his first screen appearance in 1928, delivering his now-famous Treasure Report (which he first performed live in 1922), Benchley established himself as a sly satirist, even as he stammered and stumbled through his nonsensical monologue. Benchley's amusingly inept lectures were soon mimicked by Donald Ogden Stewart, who would earn an Oscar for his screenplay of The Philadelphia Story, and later be blacklisted for his Communist associations. Curiously, the Communist witch-hunts are the focus of the rarest and perhaps funniest short in the anthology: The Witness, in which Benchley turns the tables on the governmental inquisitors with hilarious results. Benchley's wry filmic explorations of the headaches of everyday married life exhibit the literary acumen and clever insight that made him one of the best-loved humorists of the 20th Century. Mr. W's Little Game stars New Yorker columnist Alexander Woollcott (self-proclaimed leader of the Algonquin Round Table) as a fussy nightclub patron who befuddles a young woman and stuffy waiter (Leo G. Carroll) with a simple word game. Amazon.com A nifty piece of film history is revived in Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin, a collection of 14 short films (most of them around 10 minutes) featuring Benchley or his cronies from the famed intellectual circle of New York's Algonquin Hotel. This compilation has none of Benchley's shorts from the 1930s but uses mostly his work at Paramount in the early 1940s. The archival gems, however, are his first two efforts, The Treasurer's Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp, early Fox Movietone sound films from 1928. In each, Benchley is an earnest lecturer defeated by the complications of his subject and by the labyrinth of his own syntax. These droll lectures anticipate a modern style of comedy that relies not on jokes but on concept and character. Nine Paramount shorts are included, the earliest being 1940's The Trouble with Husbands, with Benchley explaining, and acting out, the minor irritations of domestic life--which remain the sub