User Reviews

George comes to an antique store to buy a statue. The salesman keeps telling him he's not buying anything. It almost escalates into a fight until the manager fires him. The fired salesman exclaims that five minutes before he had simply started walking into work without even being hired! He then asks how he can never keep a job before slamming the door breaking the glass! The manager then points George to Gracie. George wants to once again buy a statue but Gracie goes into a hilarious tangent beginning with her belief that Abraham Lincoln was the first president of the United States! It goes on like this for about five minutes until George mentions that he wants an unbreakable statue. Gracie attempts to prove the statues are such by throwing one on the floor. It breaks! The manager comes back and throws one from another section. It also breaks! George takes one to prove his is unbreakable. It also breaks! Short ends by this point. Once again the routines that made George and Gracie a hit on vaudeville serves them well here. This was their fourth short. After a few more they would try features where they would achieve some success. Their most successful mediums, however, would be radio and television where they would end their career together after Gracie retired in 1958. George would continue until his death at 100 in 1996. But Burns and Allen endures forever.

After dealing with an antique shop clerk (Chester Clute) who doesn't even works there, George Burns gets Gracie Allen as his clerk and gets the most fractured history lesson ever presented. All he's trying to do is buy a statue of George Washington whom Gracie thinks freed the slaves which leads into a conversation about the father of the country whom Gracie insist was Lincoln. The banter between them of course continues to include stories of her wacky family and it seems like George will never get out of there with the product that he came in to purchase. Just wait until she starts a conversation about her finances.

Twenty years before they went into television, Burns and Allen were a popular Vaudeville team who works in a dozen or so movie shorts and about half-a-dozen features. Gracie's timing of course is perfect and George is a terrific straight man, even getting in a few Gracie type lines that makes you wonder if there's anybody intelligent in the room. A gag about supposed unbreakable statues will have you in hysterics. Truly an extremely enjoyable one real short that proves that certain styles of comedy are timeless.