Joe quits his job and opens a restaurant. But with his dim-witted neighbor Marvin (Rodney Bell) as the chef, the restaurant opens and closes in one day.
The most interesting part of this mediocre short is the casting. Abbott & Costello veteran Jane Frazee (Buck Privates, Hiya, Chum) takes over domestic duties as Joe's wife Alice for the remainder of the series (except for the final two shorts). Based on her debut entry, though, she doesn't appear very thrilled about the job. Also, one wonders if bad-movie director Ed Wood spent his spare time watching Joe McDoakes comedies. The second member of Wood's stock company to appear in a McDoakes short, Lyle Talbot (best known as a general in Wood's cult classic Plan 9 from Outer Space) here plays the health inspector who shuts down Joe's restaurant.
On the debit side, it appears that Joe and Marvin learned their culinary techniques solely from multiple viewings of the Three Stooges short Busy Buddies (1944, where the trio played similarly inept cooks). Most of the food gags here inspire queasiness instead of laughter. (Example: When Marvin gets an order for alphabet soup, he flattens out some dough and runs it through a typewriter so that he can type the letters for the soup!)
Before long, the short just gets infuriating, mainly because it's full of "gags" that don't have anything to do with real behavior. Even a neophyte such as Joe would know enough not to prepare a salad by crunching up the lettuce with his bare hands, in plain sight of his customers. Based on the stupidity that runs throughout this short (especially an eye-poppingly dumb final gag), it's no wonder Jane Frazee looks as though she'd rather be somewhere else.
Our rating: (C) 2012, Steve Bailey.
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