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Joe has two irritating problems: a
painful toothache and having to baby-sit with his brother Rupert, who
sits up crying all day. He enlists the aid of the gang, but it
seems that every time Rupert finally dozes off, some nearby commotion
wakes him up again. When mother returns home, Joe is able to take
his mind off Rupert for awhile and concentrate on the toothache instead.
He's got a dollar to have the tooth pulled by a local dentist, but
Farina convinces him to save the money and let the gang do the work.
With one end of a string tied to the tooth and the other wrapped around
the tail of canine Pete, the job is swiftly accomplished; but the dollar
bill has fallen into the hands of baby brother Wheezer, who sells it to
a sharp-eyed youngster for a penny. The gang takes off after the
conniving kid for a chase finale.
Noisy Noises takes come simple comic
ideas and makes the most of them. One could hardly ask for more
satisfying results. Rupert is the cryingest baby either side of
the Rockies, but like most such infants, he has a sixth senses about
when to cry so the effect will be most annoying. Joe tries to
rock him to sleep, and the child begins to nap when suddenly a man next
door starts practicing his bass fiddle. Snap—Rupert
is up and bawling. But when poor, beleaguered Joe rocks the cradle
to vigorously that the wooden structure falls apart, Rupert seems
downright amused, and even more so when the bumbling older brother trips
over himself trying to transfer him to a baby carriage. The
ultimate irony comes when, near the end of the film, Rupert's carriage
breaks loose and rolls down a steep hill into the midst of
traffic; cars swerve just in time to avoid crashing into the
perambulator. As frosting on the cake, a monkey somehow gets into
the act and leaps into the runaway carriage next to Rupert who
immediately clings to the animal. And is this obstreperous crybaby
shedding tears during such a frightening experience? Of course
not. He's having the time of his life, while Joe is going crazy.
Entitling this short Noisy Noises was
doubtless an advertising ploy aimed at sound-conscious exhibitors and
the growing legion of box office customers who had been sampling some of
the experimental part-talkies over the past year and were clamoring for
more. Hal Roach had not yet produced his first talking comedy but
in a primitive attempt to blend sound with moving images, Roach was
delivering music and sound effects tracks together with his picture
negatives to MGM. Though no such recorded tracks or discs for
Noisy Noises can be located today, the original sound effects and
discordant musical instruments (not requiring the same kind of precise
synchronization that dialogue did) were probably quite convincing, even
startling, for 1929 audiences in the unique position of straddling
movies' silent and sound eras.
Some of the "noise" gags are quite funny,
and most of them deal with music. The bowing of a bass fiddle next
door vibrates all the furniture in the room, while a tuba player's
blasts send the curtains on his windows flapping in the air! Best
of all is a portly woman who comes for a voice lesson; her teacher, well
prepared, has cotton in his ears to shield himself from her crackling
coloratura. "Sounds like murder," says Farina when he hears it.
The gang gets her out of the way by sending a mouse scurrying into the
room; one look and the lady dives out the apartment window in fright.
One gag used in Noisy Noises has
always retained a certain fascination, for it falls into the Silent
Comedy Lexicon, a magna carta of established rules that prevail
in comedy films and nowhere else on earth. When the gang is trying
to figure out a way to quiet the tuba player, a passing fruit vendor
suggests that if they suck on lemons in front of him, his lips will
pucker up and he'll be unable to play. This gag (and its first
cousin, where someone swallows a dose of alum with similar consequences)
turns up in countless comedy films, including the Our Gang talkie
Mike Fright. Apparently following another non-sequitur
comedy precept, the one that holds, "Seeing is believing," Roach
gag-writers counted on young viewers simply accepting such nonsense—and
of course, we did!
On the other hand, one gag sequence near the
end of the film derives its humor from total audience identification.
After Farina ties one end of a string to Joe's tooth and the other to
Pete's tail, he tells "Round Boy" to stand still as Pete runs after a
ball. Naturally, when Pete starts running, Joe can't stand the
suspense and has to run after him to keep the rope slack; the idea of
standing there and letting the tooth be yanked is too much to bear—as it
probably would be for any of us. The tooth is pulled only when Joe
is distracted by something else—and then, of course, he doesn't even
notice. |
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