The short subjects in this series tend to cluster in groups of eight, in terms of when they were released. Much like a tv sitcom, there are breaks over the summer. The first Thelma and ZaSu short, Let’s Do Things, is an outlier as it was filmed in the production block for The Boy Friends apparently. Excluding Things (and the three silent shorts that don’t feature any of the 30s characters), there are forty Girl Friends shorts. Thus, there are five “seasons” of the series and The Old Bull is the end of season one.
It’s frustrating when it seems like only some of these movies got much love and care, and the others are just filler. On The Loose, Sealskins, and Strictly Unreliable are the installments that really work. Let’s Do Things, Catch-As Catch-Can, and The Pajama Party have some degree of quality, but also some big issues. War Mamas, Red Noses, and this one collapse under the weight of the problems. Admittedly, there is at least some degree of good humor and rewatchability in all of them. It’s still hard to appreciate when literally at the very beginning of the season one finale, Thelma is mumbling. Note when she says, “I better drive, ZaSu.” The initial gag is also under rehearsed, just feeling like an uncomfortable argument.
On top of that is the bad greenscreen. Although it is pretty funny, it ruins the chance of taking anything away from the scene other than how bad it looks. While applying logic to the greenscreen is fruitless, as the car doesn’t even look level to the ground, there’s one point where a cow is in a spot where logically it would have been hit due to its placement when the car lines up with it, though it doesn’t fall down or in any way respond to the car that’s flying by. The continuity and editing is just as sloppy and thoughtless as always. While there sometimes is charm to it, that can’t be said here. It just seems like needless mistakes.
There’s of course good gags. “And you ran right through the door!” “But the door wasn’t open?” Something about a potted plant unexpectedly hitting Thelma in the head got a big laugh. Its suddenness and unexpectedness, especially when compared to the rest of this short, leaves it a standout. Even beyond that, it shows that women can get into this type of violent and brash comedy just as well as men can. The gags with the cat are very good, especially the last one. It’s such a ridiculous and creative idea that it works. Another fun moment is a cow’s moo that obviously sounds like a person imitating a cow. The duck on ZaSu’s rump also got a laugh. As is typical, there are moments for us to see some lady skin. The scene of Thelma removing oats from ZaSu’s stocking seems designed just to get us some skin. Foot fetishists, your day has come!
So many of the gags boil down to “Let’s do something inconspicuously”, then things happen noisily or otherwise chaotically. You’d think they could change that up a little, so it’s not so obvious it’s all one joke. Thelma, as has happened before, badgers and berates ZaSu like she hates her, with particular viciousness only in the odd scene here and there. It comes off as meanspirited and not even funny. The pacing and story improve when everything has been set up and the beats go along faster. These shorts are more about quick comedy, so it’s frustrating when they’re pointlessly slow. It’s also easier to forgive them when they don’t let up. The shoddiness never goes away, it is just sometimes fast. That’s again proven because there’s not much of an ending, with a line of dialogue from ZaSu obviously being cut off unnaturally, like someone had to trim it and wasn’t paid much to!
SPOILERS
The lion going into the girls’ car follows the common rule of old two-reelers, that the most absurd thing ever can happen, as long as it’s funny. It is amusing that there’s not even a joke that results in the lion going there, it just walks in. While obviously layering gags is preferable, where every scene provides at least the attempt at humor, there’s something to be admired about the shamelessness on display. For whatever this is worth, when the farmer finds our heroes with the car, he doesn’t shoot them, even though he said he would. Yet again, unnatural things happen in order to justify the narrative and mainly the humor. Him earlier threatening to shoot them establishes the stakes, but if he actually did, that wouldn’t be funny most likely.
OVERVIEW
Thelma and ZaSu don’t bring as much personality to their performances as they normally do, with the short seemingly being more about situational gags that come from the story instead of what the actors are doing. Still, great acting isn’t that necessary here, though it would’ve been nice. The Old Bull is more middle of the road. It’s not too bad, but not exceptional. Patsy Kelly certainly could’ve gotten more mileage from it than ZaSu did.
Taking in season one of The Girl Friends as a whole, while it’s understandable and to be expected that a series would need time to get on its feet, it’s far too easy for Roach shows to really lose focus. That being said, there are sometimes hilarious moments or even whole episodes that are great, it’s just a little tiresome when you have to deal with extremely shoddy filmmaking and the poor comedy. While I am not in this camp, some really like the ridiculous moments of discontinuity and other flubs. It’s certainly easy to see how people like that. You have to to some degree, as that’s so constant. Still, there is more to be taken from the performers and their characters.
While possibly not intentional, Thelma the character gives off a sense of insecurity that she’s not aware of. This could explain why she hangs around ZaSu, because ZaSu is more obviously ridiculous and idiotic, thus making Thelma look good by comparison. In Bull, Thelma tells someone they have no money, in an attempt to get out of trouble. This means either she’s lying and is thus willing to lie about that, or she’s not and she somehow has the ability to own nice clothing. Probably for the sake of changing up the look of the series, the girls wear a lot of different clothes, which in-universe suggests they’re buying them, possibly for social clout. To sum up Thelma, in a situation, she will try to make herself as social as possible, then fail, or possibly succeed by embracing the weird part of her she wants to suppress. Things like the clothing could be her attempt to fit in.
Thelma the actor carries this very well, though that might be more down to the writing, especially considering that these shorts probably are not intended to have continuity. Thelma consistently supplies laughs every installment, though there are some signs of phoning it in or she isn’t always given the best of material. However, she simply seems good enough at rolling with these punches to still come off well. Considering how often the distress of her character comes across, you can about imagine that’s intentional, and also notably not like Oliver Hardy, who she is sometimes compared to. She seems stuck to holding an image of having feminine grace and class that cannot be applied to Hardy.
It’s always strange when ZaSu, whose actress is twelve-and-a-half years older than Thelma’s, yells the latter’s name like she’s a lost child wanting her mother. While ZaSu is consistently obviously out of place in society and unsociable, she lacks a sense of core characterization that Thelma has. As is common with these types of characters, sometimes they’re just a little dim and other times idiotic to absurd degrees depending on the episode. That “lost child” characterization is not really there early on, popping up later as an ill-advised constant in her performance for the later episodes. It damages the ability to see them as real people or people you could imagine liking each other, as it’s like Thelma is chaperoning ZaSu around. If they committed to that idea, it might work better, but it seems there are times they really are supposed to be friends, such as in parts of Red Noses.
While ZaSu has turned in some great performances, mainly in the wonderful Strictly Unreliable, when she usually doesn’t seem to have much grasp on her character or the material, she can dish out a performance lesser than that of Todd’s. Based on how often she repeats her mannerisms and body language, it seems she might be thinking of this as a job instead of giving it her all, where maybe she’d think the audience would want less diversity in her acting. She has been great in other media, so it’s not like she can’t act. ZaSu also doesn’t gel with Thelma, with the two lacking chemistry and often doing comedy independently of the other. This is especially obvious when compared to the later Patsy Kelly, who is perfect with Thelma. While Patsy and Thelma seem like they care about each other and help each other at times, Thelma and ZaSu pretty much never seem like they’re having fun or would be worse off alone.
To sum her up, the ZaSu character will stay quiet and off to the side, only to be forced into the action and in response say funny things. She can be best compared to Zeppo Marx. He generally doesn’t care for the action, but is very tolerant of it, but is lit up by things that engage him. He inexplicably associates with kooky characters, with a potential reason being shown when he does slightly weird things himself. Both also often scream of lost potential. I get the impression that if those three could pick their ideal situation, Thelma would be an uncompromised socialite, Zeppo would live in an amplified, comedic world, though with generally similar things to what you’d expect a 30s man to want, and ZaSu would live in a void where nothing is happening, particularly nothing bad. That push and pull between someone that wants to be meeting people and someone that wants to be separated is a great idea, but it’s just not used, essentially because they usually are put in foreign areas that neither want to be in and they make practically no attempt to act like they’re liking it. If ZaSu played more into “I just want to be in my void”, that’d make for a much more interesting character.
Despite all this, Strictly Unreliable is probably the best short here, and it is very ZaSu-heavy and Thelma-light. That just goes to show that ZaSu can pack a punch. Ranking the shorts of this “first season” would go: War Mamas, Red Noses, The Old Bull, The Pajama Party, Catch-As Catch-Can, On The Loose, and a tie of Sealskins and Strictly Unreliable. Despite that some of these are pretty lame and might not even focus on one of the girls heavily, they all have enough laughs to be worth a rewatch, but that might just be because I love ZaSu Pitts and especially Thelma Todd so much that it’s nice to see them in anything, especially something with reasonably fast pacing. However, anyone not a fan of either of the girls or the Hal Roach style of comedy but does like classic comedy should only stick to the best of the bunch.
The Filme Diary 