A comedy with Lauck, Goff, ZaSu Pitts and Louise Currie, the installment about the quest for heroic deeds, the spectacles and the horse-race; the two shopkeepers go through an eyeglasses craze, and own a beautiful horse, the plot is neat, with mellow, harmless, gentle humor. A good show from the golden age. ZaSu could be piquant (so it was a bit unfair to have her considered as marrying stock for the oldster, though the player was younger than her), and her couple of scenes with Lauck are enjoyable. It's the milder Goff who gets the heroic behavior: chasing away the scoundrels, and riding the horse. These movies weren't radio with footage; the style they have given them was right.
The sense of place had made the show so loved, and it's conveyed here as well, although with a small but exquisitely managed cast, so it would be more rightly termed a sense of a world; it's not the life of a whole town, but mainly the lives of the two shopkeepers and their regulars. The life of the town is an occasional background, inasmuch as it concerns the two pals. The sense of the place is realized by focusing on the two main characters: so, more of a suggestion of a way of life, of a world; the values are ordinary ones: not wisdom, nor altruism, but immediate generosity, etc., which looks more convincing.
Goff's character is, in terms of action, both less and more effective than Lauck's: more gullible, easier to cheat, but also occasionally impressive in his achievements: scaring the scoundrels, chasing the interlopes, even winning a race
.
If there's any folksy wit, it doesn't belong to the two pals; they don't outwit their opponent, but have other qualities. Anyway, they both come across as massively silly. Some pretend the show is about the clash of two types of wit; but the shopkeepers have none (well, generally, save for sending the sheriff to find the missing husband
).
The show is very likable, not its two leads, whose silliness comes across not as endearing, but annoying: they are honest, but imbecile, and innocence prevails here because the custom in show requires it.