Pan Handlers (1936)
** (out of 4)
This Girl Friends short was the first one after the death of Thelma Todd. Patsy Kelly continued with the series and they brought in Pert Kelton as her new partner in crime. In the film the girls spend their last fifty-dollars buying some pots and pans that they then have to try and sell. Door after door they're turned down until they run across a new bride who offers to buy them if the girls will cook a meal for her husband and his boss. PAN HANDLERS isn't a very good film but what shocked me is how much better the story is than many of the previous Todd-Kelly shorts. I'm not sure if the studio spent a few extra dollars getting the right screenplay down but the actual story is an interesting one but very little is done with it. Kelly pretty much is forced to be the entire show so this means she screams a lot and very loudly. It isn't quite as annoying as some of her other shorts but at the same time it's not funny. There's a politically incorrect sequence where she calls a Chinese man FuManchu and this is followed with an unfunny sequence where she agrees with a deaf man. Kelton pretty much stands around just offering support but the two women have zero chemistry and it's easy to say she was just a poor substitute. It's a real shame this story wasn't used earlier in the series because I'm sure it could have been a lot better with Kelly and Todd. The series would offer up two more shorts with Kelly and a new partner but both of them were beyond bad so needless to say but the series was certainly done with by this point.
