In Come Clean, Ollie tells Stan to divert their wives by telling them a joke. The camera later cuts to Stan giving the punchline — “…and the farmer shot the traveling salesman!” — and the wives’ outrage at the blue humor.
Unfortunately, Come Clean itself almost inspires that kind of reaction. The crux of the movie is that Stan and Ollie thwart the attempted suicide of a woman (Mae Busch) whom, until movie’s end, comes off as a plain old floozie. This characterization is only furthered when the woman insists that, since Stan and Ollie saved her life, they’ll have to take her home with them or she’ll scream bloody murder.
Up to that point, the movie has been fairly funny, with a reprise of a routine from Should Married Men Go Home? where Ollie and his wife try to convince the visiting Laurels that they’re not at home, and a great scene at an ice-cream parlor with Charlie Hall as the sneering vendor.
But when the movie tries to milk Stan and Ollie’s hide-the-floozie routine for ever-diminishing humor, the fun starts to leak out of the movie. At one point, Mae, locked in another room, turns on the radio to a blaring broadcast of “Stars and Stripes Forever.” (Coincidentally, that same march, also blaring from a radio, hampered the schemes of burglars Harpo and Chico Marx in Duck Soup. Was there a Los Angeles radio station that played the march non-stop in the ’30s?) The best that Stan and Ollie can do to cover up the noise is bang pots and pans and march around the room like little children. Characters this child-like should not be asked to milk a blackmail scheme for comedy.
The movie closes with a semi-“freak ending” where Stan, taking a bath while fully clothed, gets the plug pulled on him by Ollie and goes down the drain (suggested via sound effects). It’s as if the movie’s players are as eager to get rid of their sordid situation as the audience is.
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