THE LAUREL AND HARDY SOUND SHORTS:Ranking 35-30

35.THEY GO BOOM! (1929)

Along with Unaccustomed As We Are, this is a wholly-set bound and rather creaky early talkie which is nonetheless not without its merits, particularly in a sequence that applies one painful indignity on another on the unfortunate Ollie, bedridden with a heavy dose of flu, and a hilarious moment when he attempts to blow air into a mattress, but through Stan's well-meaning receives it all back rather too quickly which distorts his stomach to massive proportions (a similar gag occurs in Be Big!).

They Go Boom! was available for many years in only mediocre prints, not available on VHS or DVD until the mid 1990's in Britain, where it had only appeared on TV in silent form in a version obtained from Canadian TV without its soundtrack, accompanied instead by an annoying piano backing the action. I myself saw the film with in its original sound version at a Sons of the Desert meeting for the first time in the early 1980's, where the "Boom!" indicated by the title was anything but, just a mute puff of dust which was rectified by the restored and cleaned-up version that became available in the 90's, which makes the climatic scene work far better than the original which due to early problems with sound dubbing came across as embarrassing rather than funny. 

34.TWICE TWO (1933)

Having played their own children in Brats three years earlier, it was inevitable that the boys would probably play their own wives sooner or later as they do here, but the previous film is far better. The double exposures are nicely if not cleverly done throughout as indicated by the still above, but the rather over-complicated nature of the production negates against Laurel and Hardy's usual spontaneous, off-the-cuff style which appears both over-rehearsed and static, as the film tries to get laughs with them dressing in drag, a thin enough premise to begin with as the story itself is very routine (even more so if it had been actresses playing their wives) and the material therein only mildly funny, with the better moments near the beginning, with Ollie as of all things a Brain Specialist (!), with Stan as his specialist advisor (!!), typing out the cryptic message "NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN TO COME TO THE AID OF THEIR PARTY". The seminal 'LAUREL AND HARDY' book from 1975 gave this a mere rating of half of one hat for some reason, on a par with their post-Hal Roach efforts that the book so unconditionally disliked. Twice Two is nowhere near as bad as that, but is only mediocre to average at best.

33.THE FIXER UPPERS (1935)

A reworking of the very early pre-team silent short Slipping Wives (1927), this was Laurel and Hardy's penultimate sound short at the Hal Roach studios, and although far superior to its previous prototype of years before, is a rather stolid and low-key effort before the team settled into making features at Roach, as they indeed did for the rest of their cinematic career. The Fixer Uppers is bolstered by its supporting cast: Arthur Housman doing his usual drunk bit, Mae Busch in one of her more sympathetic guises (though she gives Stan a kick up the rear in one scene) and a very stentorian Charles Middleton, a good foil for the boys as he was for other comedians such as Harold Lloyd and The Marx Brothers. One of Lloyd's best known foils, the burly Noah Young, appears briefly as a bartender, the first time he had appeared alongside the team since their early silent days.

In its favour, the film is amusing if unremarkable throughout, with quite good production values, which may or may not be Paris, and the funniest moment being a phone call Stan takes in a bar replying "It sure is!" after being told "It's a long distance from Atlanta, Georgia". Completely absurd and pointless, but so nice.

32.BEAU HUNKS (1931)

"Four reels was a clumsy length for Laurel and Hardy, and they never repeated it",wrote William Everson in 1967. This is not wholly accurate, as the comedians had made foreign language four reel versions of short films such as Night Owls and Blotto, and even a short feature length version of Chickens Come Home. Beau Hunks, however, is their only English language four-reeler, and Everson would have been better in stating that a film of forty minutes in length is clumsy for anyone, full stop.

Four reels has always been a rather unwieldy amount of time for film makers and distributors, falling in the no-man's land of the short and feature length film. Chaplin and Keaton attempted this with varying success, Keaton more successfully in his 1924 classic Sherlock Jr, and the French directors Jean Vigo (Zero de Conduite) and Jean Renoir (Une Partie de Campagne) were forced by reasons of time and budget to release featurettes rather than features in the 30's, both flawed masterpieces.

Beau Hunks was an obvious reworking of  Beau Geste and other Foreign Legion epics, and it may have worked somewhat better in short feature length form than it does here. It was apparently several minutes longer on its original release, with some footage removed in a reissued version after it was deemed too unacceptable in the Production Code era after 1934 (remember this was made in the pre-code period). This footage is still lost, and the reissued version begins rather abruptly with Ollie singing "You Are The Ideal of My Dreams", whereas in the original he was humming "Pagan Love Song" at the beginning. Hardy always had a great singing voice, but regretfully there are few examples of him as such in the L & H canon, even fewer examples of his comic partner. The opening scene is very amusing, learning of his rejection by "Jeanie-Weanie" (Jean Harlow, that is), which has a spectacular slapstick coda, as are the opening preliminaries in the Foreign Legion, with a reworking of a gag from their last silent Angora Love which works all the better in sound. 

The film gets dragged down with some non-comic plotting in its midsection, along with some ripe dialogue and hammy acting from unfamiliar actors which add little but superfluous padding, in which Stan and Ollie regrettably are mostly absent, though when they turn up later, the film perks up again with a very funny finale where the boys capture the bare-footed riffs with barrels of sharp tacks, ending with the "Jeanie-Weanie" running joke.

Beau Hunks is patchy, containing some good material, but too much serious and not very interesting story line with straight dialogue and actors that comes across as unintentionally funny (at least director James W.Horne appropriately sends up his role as the leader of the riffs), with the film being a slightly foreknowing precursor to the features that would take over from shorts regarding padding and plot which would get in the way of their glorious partnership.

31.MEN O'WAR (1929)

One of their better early talkies, Men O'War benefits from location filming in a public park, with the comedians looking more assured and sounding more confident in front of a microphone than in their first two sound shorts (Unaccustomed As We Are, Berth Marks). It was also notable for their greatest foil James Finlayson's first appearance in a L & H talkie, where he already is coming out with his celebrated "Doh!" catchphrase (if it can be described as thus). The basics of the film are reworkings from the now-departed silent days: Sailors flirting with girls (Two Tars); taking them for a soda (Should Married Men Go Home?); and a final reciprocal destruction battle on a boating lake (many of their silents).

The opening scene has a pleasantly risque joke of a pair of misplaced panties (as indicated above) and a misunderstanding with the two young women that leads to the soda fountain, which although has one or two slightly awkward moments is much superior than the silent version, that was better paced yet flowers much better with dialogue and an exasperated Finlayson serving the drinks. The final sequence, which attempts to duplicate the street battle sequences from silent efforts such as The Battle of The Century and You're Darn Tootin', doesn't really come off in the more realistic, slower-moving medium of sound film, and even cutaway reaction shots from Fin don't really help matters, as does the annoying screams and yelps from the two girls the boys have picked up. Men O'War then is consistently amusing until its misguided final sequence, indicating there were still one or two problems needed to be ironed out in their transfer from silent to sound movies.

30.ONE GOOD TURN (1931)

One Good Turn shows the boys on their uppers as happened in many of their films, but in rather more distressing circumstances than normal as this is was the only Roach film in their canon where the Depression of the 1930's was directly referred to. Barring a ragged-looking tent, the boys are obviously homeless and struggling to feed themselves, and through Stan's ineptitude even these sparse comforts are destroyed, leaving their car as their only real possession.

The film has a realistic, rather gritty look about it as befits an unusually tough story line, though kindly old lady Mary Carr takes pity on them by providing a hearty meal.They misconstrue a confrontation with James Finlayson where he threatens to throw her in the street over unpaid rent (it is actually a rehearsed scene from an amateur dramatics group) and they offer to auction their only remaining possession, their trusty Model T Ford, to help her.

One Good Turn leaves rather mixed feelings while watching it; the material is amusing, the essential decency and humanity of Stan and Ollie comes to the fore throughout, but the plot itself is decidedly grim, with the gags involved just about funny enough to take one's mind off such a miserable and sad set of circumstances. The 'landlord' scene between Finlayson and Carr is so deliberately over-the-top as to be hilarious (contrast this with similar scenes and dialogue in Beau Hunks, which were played seriously and ended up perhaps being even funnier), and Billy Gilbert appears in his first L & H film, atypically but amusingly playing a drunk. Stan's reaction to Ollie's misunderstanding of him stealing money of the old lady is rather startling but did happen on occasion, but no more savagely than in this film, but Stan gets his comeuppance at the end, with Ollie chasing him away, as they will presumably make up and live to fight another day despite being left with virtually nothing (except $120 dollars).