High Gear (1931)
*** (out of 4)
Mickey (Mickey Daniels) gets kicked out of the house by his father but at least he lets him take the car out for a spin. He picks up Dave (David Sharpe) and Alabam (Grady Sutton), as well as three girls, and head out for some fun but end up running into a jerk police officer (Edgar Kennedy) and a group of thugs. This was the fifth entry in Hal Roach's "Boy Friends" series and the first and only to be a three-reeler but to be far this here just runs five-minutes longer than the other films. I thought for the most part all of the jokes worked very well with the middle sequence dealing with Kennedy being the best. We get the typical jokes like the pen spitting ink in his face and the boys making a few jokes at him and while this might not be original it's still very funny here. Another nice gag involves a trip at the end where the boys stumble into a house where some thugs are hiding. The thugs and boys keep battling one another by throwing the other out a window and into the mud. Again, nothing too original but it works here. Kennedy clearly steals the film as the doomed cop but Mickey does a very good job as well. Director Stevens seems a lot more at ease in terms of building the scenes for their laughs.