Item: Sham Poo, the Magician
Rating: 7.1
Author: Archivist John

Look, if you have twenty minutes to kill and love old-school slapstick, Sham Poo, the Magician is worth a quick peek today. Modern audiences who need actual logic or clean audio will absolutely hate it, though. 🤷‍♂️

It is a weird little relic from the early sound era. The plot is barely there, mostly just an excuse to throw a bunch of gag writers in a room and see what sticks.

We get these two goofy American tourists who are just incredibly obnoxious. They are wandering around some "exotic" foreign location that is clearly just a cheap Hollywood backlot with a couple of potted palms.

They start flirting with a cigarette girl, played by the lovely Dorothy Granger. She has this great, tired look on her face that says, "I am not getting paid enough for this short film."

Then they run into the magician. His fake beard is the real star of the show.

Seriously, it looks like it was glued on five minutes before the camera started rolling, and it moves weirdly whenever he talks. He does some cheap tricks, the tourists annoy him, and then things go completely off the rails.

Suddenly there is a monster. I won't spoil what the monster looks like, but let's just say the budget did not allow for anything remotely scary.

Sham Poo, the Magician scene — Scene from Sham Poo, the Magician

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Sham Poo, the Magician (1932) through its definitive frames.

It has that same chaotic, shouting-at-the-microphone energy you find in other early talkies like The Ghost Talks. Everyone is just yelling their lines because they probably didn't trust the sound equipment yet.

Bud Jamison is in this, and he is always a treat to watch. You might know him from the old Three Stooges shorts, where he usually played a cop or a frustrated boss.

Here, he gets to do his classic double-takes. Nobody did a slow burn quite like Bud.

The pacing is pretty wild. It feels like they shot about thirty minutes of random gags and then just cut it down with a pair of rusty scissors.

Some jokes land, some just sort of whimper and die. It is much more frantic than something like Roll Your Own, which is a bit more patient with its setup.

My favorite moment is a completely unnecessary bit where a guy just falls over a table. There is no setup for it, he just falls, and the camera lingers on him scrambling back up for way too long.

It is these little mistakes that make these old shorts so charming to watch today. You can feel the crew just trying to get through the day.