Film #047 - Private Snuffy Smith (1942)
Viewed February 16, 2006
Private Snuffy Smith is based on the long running comic strip Barney Google and Snuffy Smith and mines some of the same hillbilly territory covered by the more famous Li’l Abner, which had made it’s own leap to the big screen two years earlier.
It’s a fun little movie, from a time when lighthearted army comedies were common and comic strips were still a force in the national consciousness. The situations are typical army shenanigans, involving war maneuvers, spies and the typical misunderstandings and nonsense often seen in 1940s war comedies.
The casting is not bad, although I would have done without putting a huge fake nose on Bud Duncan, who I think could have portrayed Snuffy just fine without it. Sarah Padden brings Snuffy’s wife Loweezy to life pretty much verbatim from the comic as a large, boisterous woman, but could have done with a bit more life to her. The thick accent she has (or uses) also seems at odds with the rest of the cast. I think she was cast mainly for her physical presence. The rest of the cast is made up of typical comedic army or hillbilly types and, while not exactly original, nonetheless are amusing in their unchallenging roles.
The simplistic sets and (mostly effective) use of stock footage are a dead giveaway of the film’s low budget nature, yet it still manages several varied locations with distinctive feels to them. Costuming is another area where the film suffers. While the army uniforms look fine, the hillbillies seem to have been costumed out of a community theater. A more universally stylized approach, like that taken in Li’l Abner, would have eliminated this problem and connected the film more closely to its comic strip roots.
There was a time when one-hour features were commonplace. Frankly, it’s a format whose disuse is unfortunate. A film like Private Snuffy Smith could never have been stretched to more than an hour, but fills the time perfectly. Comics were particularly well served by the hour-long format, as evidenced by things like the Dick Tracy films and the aforementioned Li’l Abner. They, like Private Snuffy Smith provide a nice, neat little bundle of entertainment. And in this era of bloated two-and-a-half-to-three-hour movies, sometimes it’s just what the doctor ordered.
Note: If you wish to see Private Snuffy Smith, just follow this link to the Internet Archive. The film is considered to be in the public domain and is freely downloadable. Although there is an MPEG2 file available, try the MPEG1 instead. It is considerably smaller and the quality was still pretty good when burned to DVD.