Calling All Pa's (1942) User Reviews

How to coddle a crying baby...

[Doylenf · 6/10 · 18 July 2008]

These Pete Smith shorts varied as to quality, but this is one of the best on how to bring up baby with father (DAVE O'BRIEN) on heavy duty whether trying to diaper the baby (unsuccessfully) or attending to any other need of a crying baby.

Only drawback is that the baby's crying tends to get on the nerves after awhile. It must have been teething during filming because the cries are constant and loud.

The humor is terrific from scene one (with all the expectant fathers looking through the glass partition at a bunch of sleeping babies and then handing out cigars to each other), and the nightime chores that mom and dad have to share when it's time for another feeding.

Dave O'Brien as Joe Thunderstruck is a champion at making faces--comparable in that respect to someone like Cary Grant who did physical comedy with such finesse. O'Brien is excellent as the desperate dad trying to catch a few hours of sleep. O'Brien cracked me up.

Enjoyable Pete Smith short is narrated by Smith, written by Joe Ansen and directed by Will Jason.

The Problems Of Having Pete Smith Comment On Your New Fatherhood

[boblipton · 7/10 · 4 April 2020]

Dave O'Brien is the father of a new baby. He shows his usual comic ineptitude, while a Smith called Pete comic snarking on the situation in this funny short.

I know that Smith won an Oscar or three for his many short subjects over the decades he was involved in them for MGM, but I see no reason to start this one with an Academy Award statuette on this one. It's another funny comedy, enlivened by Pete's commentary, and I think highly of this, but it didn't even show up on the nominations.

Decent Smith Short

[Michael_Elliott · 16 November 2009]

Calling All Pa's (1942)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Mildly entertaining short from MGM and Pete Smith has Dave O'Brien playing Joe Thunderstruck, a happy new father who learns the hard way that there's a lot of pain in becoming a dad. I ended up watching five days after the birth of my own child so I expected a lot of the humor to hit home with me but it actually didn't. I'm a big fan of these Smith/O'Brien shorts but this one here was filled with way too many easy jokes and in the end it didn't end up as funny as I was hoping. There were a few nice jokes including the whole passing out cigars, which end up going from one father to the next and so on until the point it gets back to the original owner. The entire joke with the mother-in-law stepping over your grounds didn't get the type of laughs that you'd expect nor did the entire trying to put on a diaper sequence. The one gag that did end up working was entire gag of which parent was going to get up in the middle of the night to feed the crying kid. Speaking of crying kids, whoever played the kid here certainly appears to have gone through quite a bit as she is constantly crying and appears to be incredibly upset so I hope the studio paid her well.