Hard Luck is a bit of an odd short for Buster. Like some of his other midrange work (The Goat comes to mind,) its construction feels haphazard at times, but it has a host of topnotch gags and comic business. That makes its quality hard to classify. While it’s not up there with the greats like (for me) Neighborsor The Scarecrow, it’s way too funny to discount.
As the title suggests, Buster plays a down-on-his-luck fellow here. Everything has been going wrong, and as a result, he’s decided to take matters into his own hands and off himself. However, his luck isn’t any better when it comes to committing suicide than it is with anything else, and he’s continually thwarted in his efforts. In time, though, he’s swept up in an adventure involving a beautiful girl who might just have renewed his will to live.
The main detractor here is the meandering plot. There are four or five major sequences making up this short, and while I see the thin but plausible threads connecting each one, I don’t know why these particular sequences were put together in the first place. There’s no real reason for a man hellbent on killing himself to end up on a fox hunt, for instance. Hard Luck isn’t the only Buster short where the story jumps around, but it’s the one where it feels most noticeable to me. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the premise is laid out so clearly at the beginning, and it’s almost entirely dropped for at least half of the short? At the same time, the failed-suicide-plots conceit wouldn’t have been enough to carry the whole short on its own – while darkly funny, it’s not a story in and of itself, so it definitely needed something more.
But although the short is rather a miss in terms of story, its comedy is first-rate. All the suicide gags are grim but hilarious, from Buster’s “goodbye, cruel world” blown-kiss farewell in his aborted hanging attempt to the sheer refusal of any vehicle to run him over. Naturally, it’s not until he’s prepared to live that he finds himself in any real danger – he nearly blows himself with his own campfire, and who but Buster could accidentally tied themselves to a bear? Disaster-prone doesn’t begin to cover it. And really, the gags are fantastic throughout, even in sequences that feel extraneously to the story. I’ve mentioned before how much I love the recurring gag of Buster trying to mount his much-too-big horse with faulty stirrups (the fact that he keeps coming up with new ways to mount after he’s already found a method that works is so, so Buster,) and the scene where he somersaults through a window just in time to receive a cup of tea is as funny as it is precisely-executed. The short’s ending gag is most of Buster’s most famous, perhaps in part because it was thought lost for a number of years. In Kino Video’s boxed set of Buster’s independent shorts and features, intertitles explain the missing gag and offer a surviving photo for a visual, but the scene has since been recovered and can be found online.
The short also features – who else? – Big Joe Roberts and Virgina Fox. Roberts’s outlaw villain here is just shy of a mustache-twirler, and it’s the first role that usually comes to mind when I think of his work with Buster. And Virginia Fox as the latest “girl” actually gets a bit of physical comedy. It makes me smile when she tumbles headfirst over the back of the couch.
Warnings
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