First things first: Monte Collins is obviously post-nose job here, noticeably so. It must have been Jules White who said to him " Monte, the only funny thing about you was your nose, and you went and cut it off!" An unfair comment, IMHO, but he certainly does look more generic here.
It's hard to fault this, everybody's working so hard. I have never been a fan of the stooges' "take your clothes off" bit, and though this one is more elaborate, it doesn't kill me either. This one is a couple of years earlier, so I'm assuming that it's Bruckman's work, and that the even lamer stooge ending was due to Curly's weakened health.
The traction bit is obviously from County Hospital, and it's O K, again more elaborate but not funnier. I almost feel ungrateful for not loving it, since so much work went into it. Again, Laurel and Hardy and Billy Gilbert have much more compelling distress calls than Buster, and County Hospital has all three distress calls on full display. And Billy Gilbert hanging out the window adds a thrill of danger, which this one doesn't have.
I had never encountered Elsie Ames before we started reviewing these Buster shorts, and I guess I'm lucky that her voice doesn't annoy me like it does Paul Pain ( she just sounds like Martha Raye to me ), but speaking about working hard, she's killing herself for slapstick, and it's obvious that she and Buster are born to play acrobatic comedy together. I think it was obvious to Buster, too. It would be more accurate to call her features set-pieces than just bits, and they are certainly highlights of the shorts I've seen. Too bad Buster chose to talk his way through their song - we know from Pest From The West that he could carry a tune.
Dorothy Appleby comes off very well in these shorts: she's very attractive, strikes the right attitudes for a woman trying to deal with Buster, and even takes a share of slapstick lumps, not like Elsie, of course, but in there pitching and not positioning herself above the fray at all. And to me she seems less petite in these than she does in the stooge shorts, even though in the stooge shorts she was surrounded by people even smaller than Buster. I don't know why that is, I'll just chalk it up to movie magic.
I can only hope at this point that my perspicacity is equal to my verbosity.