Free Rent (1936) User Reviews

Living off the fat of the land.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 14 September 2023]

Humorous in spots but fairly tedious and extremely dated, this stars Monte Collins whose character is gullible enough to take on the responsibility of fixing a large trailer where his family and assorted in-laws can live for free. Tom Kennedy is the brother of his Minnie Mouse sound-alike wife, a bombastic blowhard whose ego is bigger than his brainless head.

Audiences familiar with classic shorts will be more familiar with Tom's brother Edgar, the king of the slow burn, and star of dozens of similar shorts to this. The situations presented here are truly over-the-top, but there's a great message here saying that nobody goes through life getting things for free because the expenses always pop up somewhere.

Monte Collins deals with deadbeat brother-in-law Tom Kennedy in funny Columbia short

[django-1 · 8/10 · 25 January 2005]

Writer-comedian Monte Collins (who visually resembles Jim Varney)was an active presence in the late silent era and then well into the 1940s, and probably best-known today for the Columbia shorts in which he either starred or had a supporting role. This 1936 entry teams Collins, always good as an exasperated character, with Tom Kennedy, who usually played dim-witted policemen or underlings of gangsters. Here Monte's wife has invited her brother, Kennedy, and his wife and child to live with them, and Kennedy eats like a horse, smokes cigars, and drinks heavily...all charged to Collins! Needless to say, he's fed up. After they are about to get evicted from their apartment because of Kennedy's behavior, Tom suggests that they build a trailer and just "Live off the land." The last 2/3 of the short is devoted to their misadventures as everything possible goes wrong. Kennedy and Collins, both regulars at Columbia over a long period, work very well together--they'd worked together in a handful of shorts prior to this--and lovers of physical slapstick in the Columbia (think Three Stooges) tradition will definitely enjoy this short. (see reviews of two other Collins shorts: THOSE TWO BOYS (1929, silent) and the strange TECHNO-CRAZY (1933)).