The Great Library Misery (1938)
* (out of 4)
Awful "comedy" has Mr. Smith (Arthur Q. Bryan) moving to a new town where he hears about a free public library. He goes there to try and get a card but the frustration is so bad that it makes him write a letter to a "Grouch" club where he hopes to join. I love all sorts of films and I especially love watching Turner Classic Movies, which means I watch quite a few shorts each month. In fact, if they play one that I haven't seen then I make sure to watch it. Ever so often you come across one that is beyond bad and that's where this thing belongs because it was so annoying and painful to watch that I wanted to jump through the screen and just start breaking things. The biggest problem is that the entire thing is just so annoying that you can't have fun with it because it really is torture to watch. The annoying librarian, the annoying manager and then we've got the annoying lead character who keeps doing dumb things to try and get this free card. Of course, all of this torture is just going to lead to a very obvious and annoying ending. Thankfully this thing only ran 12-minutes or else it would have been much worse but there's still no question that this is among the worst shorts I've ever seen. The only mildly interesting thing comes from this being Bryan's first film. He's best remembered for the voice of Elmer Fudd and you can hear some of that here.