A nifty piece of film history is revived in Robert Benchley and the Knights of the Algonquin, a collection of 14 short films (most of them around 10 minutes) featuring Benchley or his cronies from the famed intellectual circle of New York's Algonquin Hotel. This compilation has none of Benchley's shorts from the 1930s but uses mostly his work at Paramount in the early 1940s. The archival gems, however, are his first two efforts, The Treasurer's Report and The Sex Life of the Polyp, early Fox Movietone sound films from 1928. In each, Benchley is an earnest lecturer defeated by the complications of his subject and by the labyrinth of his own syntax. These droll lectures anticipate a modern style of comedy that relies not on jokes but on concept and character. Nine Paramount shorts are included, the earliest being 1940's The Trouble with Husbands, with Benchley explaining, and acting out, the minor irritations of domestic life--which remain the subject through most of the shorts. The neurotic hyper-sensitivity of the stressed-out male is the subject of Nothing But Nerves, the ruination of a weekend with the boys becomes How to Take a Vacation, and the annoying habits of the American housewife are suggested in The Man's Angle. One of the most intriguing films is The Witness (1942), in which Benchley, exasperated by government hearings on loyalty and politics, imagines himself giving the congressional interlocutors a dressing-down. The humor here tends to be tame, although Benchley himself is an innately funny and abject presence.
Alexander Woollcott, one of Benchley's Algonquin buddies and fellow New Yorker writers, is the unlikely star of Mr. W's Little Game, a truly odd and funny piece from 1934. Woollcott is not a natural for the camera, but his chubby, owlish persona is amusing, and some of his erudite put-downs are choice. Two quietly comical films from 1929 feature Donald Ogden Stewart, a future Oscar-winning screenwriter, giving fractured lectures on traffic around Broadway and bird-watching. --Robert Horton
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