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Hal Roach Forgotten Comedies on DVD

Housekeeper's Daughter - Hal Roach, the master of comedy, has come up with a hilarious spoof of murder mysteries, the 'front-page' type of picture and romantic comedies, all brought to delicious life by a cast of veteran players. Joan Bennett is the title character, Hilda by name, whose past starts to intrude on her new life. A former intimate of 'the mob', our heroine decides she has had enough and returns to her mother, the housekeeper for a wealthy young chap who has ambitions to become a newspaperman. Before long, everyone from heroine t full-steam and reporter (Adolphe Menjou), a photographer (William Gargan), the police and even the hoods are up to their eyebrows in a murder as someone gleefully goes about bumping off his victims with poisoned coffee. Things move their hilarious way to a mad sequence of events in which Hal Roach brings out some old, tried-and-true laugh-getters... as well as a variation on the classic custard-pie brawl. Only this time, it's a roof-top duel with every form of fireworks imaginable, from skyrockets to roman candles? The murderer is eventually exposed, but not before the laughs have run rampant and the viewer has had a whale of a time. Turnabout - From the novel by Thorne Smith, the man who created the character 'Topper,' comes this way-out fantasy about a bickering husband and wife who are given the opportunity to switch personalities for a day by an ancient oracle. The ensuing complications make for a hilarious comedy fantasy. Road Show - Rich playboy Drogo Gaines is in imminent danger of marrying a gold digger and escapes by feigning insanity. The jokes on him when he wakes up in an asylum full of comical lunatics. There he befriends Colonel Carraway, and together they escape, catching a ride with a beautiful blonde who proves to be Penguin Moore, the carnival owner. The adventures of Drogo and the Colonel with Moore's Carnival are replete with Hal Roach slapstick.