I've been slacking on this thread, so here's some Laurel and Hardy reviews I just shit out a minute ago that I watched on TCM:
Swiss Miss
The worst thing you can do to a Laurel and Hardy movie is limit how much you see Laurel and Hardy. By this point in their career (late 30s), Laurel and Hardy could do whenever they wanted. This was firmly them in their prime - so you would think the final result here would be a classic.
It's not. In fact, it's probably the weakest Laurel and Hardy movie I've seen. When the duo is on screen, it's great. Even if they reboot a Music Box scenario and try to get a piano across a bridge, it's still them with utterly perfect comedic timing. I'll forgive the bad gorilla gags as well, their timing and goofs more than make up for something that tired.
Then there's the rest of the movie. Something of a half-focused plot about a composer, his wife and an inn that all feels like a completely different movie (mostly because Laurel and Hardy rarely cross paths with them) and it also fills most of the 70 minute running time. It's as though they took a Laurel and Hardy short then plugged in this other stuff and the result is an utterly dull movie that would have worked better as a short.
2 out of 5
Sons of the Desert
A classic in every sense of the word, and possibly Laurel and Hardy's best film, Sons of the Desert is full of some of the best wit the duo put out there. The banter and dialogue is top notch, sight gags and physical comedy (notably when Hardy is pretending to be sick) is them at their peak and everything feels so fresh and new with some of these jokes being redone for later films.
All Stan and Oliver want to do is go to a convention in Chicago. That's a simple set up, but here they spend most of it not actually there or even going there, it's them coming up with a scheme to trick their wives to letting them attend. With Mae Busch yet again playing Oliver's wife, something she did in a dozen or so movies and shorts, the crew is just a well oiled machine. If someone wanted to get into Laurel and Hardy, this is probably one of the first recommendations I would make.
I hadn't seen Sons of the Desert in some time, revisiting it just made me realize how perfect it really is. Do I personally prefer Flying Dueces and Block-Heads? Sure, but that's like picking your favorite child in the end.
5 out of 5
A Chump at Oxford
A Chump at Oxford is a movie I had always seen parts of but never as a whole. There's a reason for that: it's like Saturday Night Live in that there are a lot of great hits, but some pretty mediocre to just bad misses as well. It's a later-ish Laurel and Hardy picture, but also only one year after The Flying Deuces so the inconsistency in the story and comedy is simultaneously that much more noticeable and that much more disappointing.
The "chump" aspect is kind of a misnomer; that aspect of the story doesn't really come up until the last 15 minutes. Yet that might be the best aspect because, like Sons of the Desert, the path getting there is probably the funniest moments as we follow Stan and Ollie through various routines and jobs until they eventually get to Oxford. There, though, it starts to take a downturn as we deal with pretty low-rate gags like a ghost some frat boys (or some sort of scholarly parallel to being utter douchebags) scare them with and Stan and Ollie do their best Abbot and Costello impression and run around scared - not really saying or doing anything funny, but at least there's action, right?
The final gag, the "chump," is nice because it allows Stan Laurel to do something he really doesn't do as his character counterpart. It's a different kind of dialouge-heavy routine at the expense of Oliver Hardy but nonetheless it's a memorable one even if his scenes are limited and the finale just a big mess of more "action" of people jumping into a pool. It's overall a solid movie but we, and probably the duo know, they've done better (Saps at Sea, the last Hal Roach produced movie, came out the same year leaving the peak Roach years behind).
3 out of 5
