French Fried Frolic (1949) User Reviews

Much Confusion

[boblipton · 5/10 · 18 November 2023]

Wally Brown and Tim Ryan are two insurance salesmen who encounter two French ladies. The ladies offer them $5,000 to pretend to be their husbands, because their uncle Emil Sitka, is coming to visit them, ready to give them $50,000 if they are happily married, and their husbands are out of town. While engaging in this persiflage, not only do Brown and Ryan's wives show up, but the ladies' husbands.

It's the sort of high-speed nonsense that Jules White's unit specialized in, along with bath tubs that are always filled for people to fall into, as well as loud sound effects, because nothing is funnier to fans of the Three Stooges, than the implication that empty skulls are being broken.

Fast-paced and funny Columbia comedy short

[2reelers · 8/10 · 2 February 2005]

Columbia paired screen comics Tim Ryan and Wally Brown for this entertaining two-reel comedy, and it pays off. Brown and Ryan make a splendid team in this fast-paced farce. Working from a script by Felix Adler, the duo make the most from some of the obvious situations, and yes, some of it may be predictable, but the film is still one of the better outputs from Columbia (this being at a time when many of the earlier comedies were being remade and remade, and stock footage was starting to figure it's way into the pictures). Stooge fans will enjoy the knockabout slapstick as well as the always delightful Christine McIntyre and character actor Emil Sitka who steals the show, as he tends to do quite often in these little two-reelers.

As I viewed the film, I observed that the short has a similar feel to the RKO comedy shorts Brown was currently starring in with Scottish born comedian Jack Kirkwood. The thing I noticed was that Tim Ryan and Jack Kirkwood slightly resembled each other, tall men with thin mustaches. Could it be that after Brown's initial short with Kirkwood ("Heart Troubles"), that maybe Columbia liked Wally enough to lure him away from RKO, and they gave him a one picture deal? I wish I knew the story behind this. After the completion of "French Fried Frolic", Brown returned to RKO to continue to appear in a handful of Kirkwood and Brown two-reelers for the next couple of years. I guess he didn't like it at Columbia.

Just for the record, Brown had co-starred with Alan Carney as RKO's answer to Abbott and Costello in a series of all-but-forgotten B-pictures a few years earlier. Some more notable than others are "Genius At Work" and "Zombies On Broadway" (both co-star Bela Lugosi).