User Reviews

To my mind, "Mo More West" is the best of the six Bert Lahr shorts that are now available in the "Ultra Rare Pre-Code Comedies" series offered on an Alpha/Oldies DVD.

In this entry, the voluble Lahr himself is in really fine form - in fact he never stops talking. Perhaps I should say that Lahr never stops shouting. At any rate, he dominates all the proceedings to such an extent that he not only appears in almost every shot, but he has easily ten times as much dialogue as anyone else in the cast. In fact, all the other players are obviously all just along to feed Lahr his lines and bits of "business".

Admittedly, unlike the rest of the cast, Florence Auer (who plays Lahr's wife) does actually get indulged with a few close-ups, but this happens only because she and Bert are no longer standing cheek to cheek in the same set. Florence is still in New York, while Bert is in the wild west.

Aside from Florence Auer, everyone else in the movie, including Harry Shannon's bank robber and Charley Grapewin's judge, is simply subordinated or even wiped out by the dominating Lahr.

None the less, if you like Lahr's brand of humor (and I must admit that I myself am in this circle) you will enjoy not only this movie, but his other short films on the Oldies DVD.

There's more than just a few coincidences arising from this Bert Lahr short that has more than just a few simililarities to "The Wizard of Oz", made five years later. There's nothing cowardly about Lahr in this to real short that has him as a carnival Shooting Gallery worker who longs to move to the west and the ends up in Poison Gulch and ends up being made sheriff. "Two shakes of a lamb's stew" is just one of many Lahr malopropisms that he utters sans cowardice as he encounters two bank robbers he had met back east. Of course, he's dumber than a witch flying under a tornado with a house in it, so the robbers get to take perfect advantage of him. Whether or not there are poppies in this gulch is never determined.

The forgotten Florence Auer (a Marjorie Main look-alike) is hysterical as his harpy wife, while that's actually veteran character actor Harry Davenport (not Charley Grapewin as listed here) in the uncredited role of the judge. Lahr's schtick kept him busy on stage, film and TV screens for decades, and he never altered from that formula. While much of the humor is dated, Lahr is much too beloved to ever disappoint, and the final shot involving a phone call with Auer in New York and him out west is downright hysterical.