The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, March 9-15
A Pair of Tights (1929)
Directed by Hal Yates
Hal Roach Studios is known best today for producing the Our Gang series and films with silent comedy stars such as Charley Chase and Harold Lloyd. Crucial to the success of the studio’s many two-reel works was the concept of the centralized extended gag, in which the bulk of a film’s running time was devoted to its heroes tying themselves up in complicated knots in a struggle to escape one set piece-based situation. This structural centering worked so well that it was applied to many Roach films involving lesser-known comics, including the team of Anita Garvin and Marion Byron. The studio’s female variation on its own duo of Laurel & Hardy lasted for three films, of which A Pair of Tights is the most acclaimed. In it, our working-class famished girls are picked up for a double-date by cheapskates (Edgar Kennedy and Stuart Erwin) who take them out for a car ride with scant desire to wine and dine them. To the “tights”’ delight, the women grab the chance to eat an inexpensive dessert before dinner. While the men’s chariot circles the block, though, Marion faces difficulties in transporting four ice cream cones outside the parlor. An eager dog, an obnoxious kid, some haughty matrons, a cop, and a street mob’s battling members all conspire with Fate to keep the quartet’s stomachs empty. A Pair of Tights will screen at Silent Clowns with four other Hal Roach Studios shorts, all of which will feature live piano accompaniment by Ben Model. Aaron Cutler (March 12, 2:30pm at the Silent Clowns film series)