Who Stepped into Buddy McDonald’s Shoes?

This is a footnote to my remarks on the short show-business career of Buddy McDonald.

I posited that because one day Buddy showed up for work from the small town of Bell, California, with no shoes, he became the Hal Roach Studios’ choice to play country boys.

In early 1935, a year and a half after the studio lost touch with Buddy, the Switzer family arrived at the Hal Roach Studios from little Paris, Illinois. Their sons, Harold and Carl Switzer, performed a musical act in the company café. Their number fit right into the current Our Gang short, “Beginner’s Luck” (IMDB; YouTube; Lucky Corner).

Harold’s face went blank when he focused on playing his mandolin. That led to the studio nickname “Deadpan” and very little to do in the movies, but he appeared as a background player and occasional stunt double for years.

In contrast, Carl Switzer had an expressive face (with no front teeth then) and an irrepressible personality. He got all the brothers’ lines and closeups in “Beginner’s Luck.” To secure him, the company offered both Switzers a long-term contract.

The studio reportedly debated what Carl’s character should be called, choosing “Alfalfa” over “Hayseed.” Either way, he was the gang’s new country boy.

At first Alfalfa dressed as a cowboy, wearing chaps and denim. (Only when he went to church in “Little Sinner” did he wear the undersized suit that later became his standard costume.)

Carl Switzer also played other roles that would once have gone to Buddy McDonald. In 1933 Charley Chase had made a comedy about visiting hillbilly country named “One of the Smiths,” with Buddy as a young hick.

Two years later, Chase returned to that rural setting in “Southern Exposure” (IMDB; YouTube). The script called for a little kid to deliver a telegram on muleback, and that became Carl Switzer’s second movie appearance.

In his 2001 interview with Richard W. Bann, Buddy McDonald recalled working with Chase:

He was a funny, funny man. His humor was droll. In one of the pictures, my line was, “Help! I swallowed twenty-five cents!”

He said, “You mean you swallowed a quarter?”

I said, “No, it was two dimes and a nickel.” I think he was playing a druggist.

That exchange doesn’t appear in any Chase short that I’ve found, so it may have ended up on the cutting room floor.

However, that routine does show up in the 1936 feature Kelly the Second, with Chase second-billed as a pharmacist. And the part of the jingly little boy was played by Carl Switzer.

The scene appears in this fan’s video, starting about 3:35 in. The jokes work, though they’re surprisingly scatalogical for the Hays Code.