Naggers at Breakfast, The (1930)
** (out of 4)
Strange Vitaphone short has a husband (Jack Norworth) and wife (Dorothy Adelphi) sitting down to enjoy breakfast but they start fighting and it lasts the entire 9-minutes of the movie. Norworth was a pretty big name on the vaudeville circuit and most people will always remember him as the man who wrote songs such as Take Me Out to the Ballgame. This short is rather strange because of how old-fashioned it is. It's funny but it shows a time when a man and woman could fight as loud as they wanted and all the neighbors would just let them go. Thankfully today someone would call the cops and have at least one of these folks arrested, which is a good thing because their antics get tiresome rather quick. They fight about the bad coffee. They fight about what time the train comes. They fight about the radio. They fight about eggs. They fight about the clocks in the house. They fight about every little thing but not one of them gets a laugh. The film remains slightly entertaining simply because you don't see this type of thing very much. To show what era it was you just need to see the closing shot where Norworth slaps his wife across the face extremely hard. Again, not funny.