A lot of people have said that Harry Langdon's downfall in the sound era was that the addition of a voice to his character -- even though he has no trouble talking on screen -- takes something away from it. The solution to this problem in this short from his second attempt at a series of two reelers in the sound era with Educational Pictures, assuming a solution is necessary, is that while this is a talking film, Harry hardly speaks at all. He delivers his lines well and for laughs ("Ruby? Oh, she went shopping."), but only when there is a reason for him to speak, which is how it should be, really, whether it is frequently or infrequently that he has such a reason.
There's a stock plot here, involving a pair of thieves out to steal a ruby, but it's incidental and mainly serves to get Harry into the film's main setting. Fortunately it doesn't intrude too much and its other influence is to cause a series of fast confusions and mistaken identities and occasion clever mechanical gags. These aren't the best feature of the film and are a little hit or miss but there are enough hits that it is worth watching. There's one, involving a balloon in a hat with a face drawn on, that visually seems to have its source in Langdon's early two-reeler "His New Mamma," and another in which he finds himself miraculously in the window of a facade that topples around him that seems to come from Buster Keaton.
The scenario is that Harry as found himself locked in a wax museum overnight (while the thieves try to steal a ruby -- so I guess it is a Wax and Valuable Ruby Museum), which is perfect for him. Somehow he always manages to extract a supernatural number of laughs from letting his naive, childlike little character interact with lifeless dummies, and the parts that really make the film memorable are when this is allowed to happen, as he gets confused by who is real and who is not, scandalized by indecent dummies, and tries to imitate them himself.
The funniest sequence has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, but is just a brilliant isolated sequence: Harry is in a park and must try to retrieve his hat, which has fallen near a sprinkler. First he is mystified by how the hose works and then stops when he blocks the water -- and then he becomes so entranced by playing with it that he forgets about the hat. Its wonderful that he can get this extended time simply to spin comedy out of the sparest materials.
My favorite moment is a quick one: Harry is puzzled by a wax glass of beer that he can't seem to drink just as a policeman peers in the museum, and the policeman thinks he is a wax figure himself because he standing so stock still in puzzlement at the beer.
Overall this feels like an otherwise unmemorable short which has been modified to fit the humor of Harry Langdon and allow for his personal style of performing. Fortunately, it is adapted well enough that Harry comes through and makes it a very funny one.