A Hot Slice of Old New York

A fantastically drawn black and white cartoon which, at 7:30 minutes, feels like a featurette. The humor is mostly situational, with topical jokes popping in only when the amazing morphing monkey recreates himself in the forms of Harpo Marx, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. This helps keep the film entertaining even for today's context-deprived youngsters (unlike so many of the 1930s cartoons filled with dozens of now-forgotten celebrities and newsmakers).
Despite his vigorous and sometimes destructive exploits (culminating in a car crash into a music store), the other characters in the cartoon are quite charmed by the cartoon's ingenue, an organ-grinder's monkey on the lam.
The cartoon is valuable for snippets of early 1930s New York culture. The organ grinder is the stereotypical Italian, chubby, mustachioed and becapped. He bears more than a passing resemblence to a slightly more life-like "Mario", and he is portrayed as considerably less intelligent and creative than his pet. The soundtrack is appropriate and entertaining. The film's final three minutes run to a setting of "42nd Street", and snippets of music from early Depression-era pop charts (like Cab Calloway's "Hi di ho") are scattered throughout.
Seventy years after being made, "The Organ Grinder" is a visual and aural time capsule of a lost world as experienced through the warped senses of studio animators. The streets are filled with Kosher butchers, pawn shops (replete with the classic three-ball sign), street vendors whose carts are stacked high with produce, open-top large-fendered automobiles, lines of wash stretched between tenement windows, old-fashioned women's support garments and much, much more.
On top of all this, the comedic timiming and general pacing of the piece are perfect. No scene lingers longer than it should, and the viewer's attention is never lost, yet the pace never results in "hanging" jokes or thematically inconsistent illogic. Ultimately more entertaining than the vast majority of longer cartoons from the 1930s, with almost none of the annoying illogic that flaws many of the Merrie Melodies series.