THE LAUREL AND HARDY SOUND SHORTS:Ranking 24-20

24.THE MIDNIGHT PATROL (1933)

A variation on their early sound short Night Owls (1930) and the previous year's Scram!, this shows the boys as official upholders of the law for the only time in their partnership, with a pre-code example of gay humour with Charlie Hall early on, various complications arising from going to a house allegedly being broken in to, and Officers Laurel and Hardy then crashing through the front door to spectacular effect,capturing the would-be prowler who is not all he seems.

This is a consistently funny but not quite outstanding short, that shows the boys essential innocence and naivety at taking on such positions of authority, all well-meaning but placidly unaware of their rights to arrest tyre thieves and safe crackers alike, with Stan charging the prowler for "robbing a house without a licence", who in the end turns out to be rather more an important figure than a mere prowler.

23.BELOW ZERO (1930)

Perhaps the bleakest, most miserable-looking L & H sound short set in run-down side streets and cafes during a snowstorm, the boys have all kind of indignities heaped upon them from grubby and hatchet-faced types like Leo Willis and Blanche Payson, finding a wallet which by sheer tragic bad luck belongs to cop Frank Holliday with whom they take for a meal who doesn't believe their story and has a brutal fate planned for them via Tiny Sandford.

Chaplin would have played such a subject for endless pathos, yet despite the dark, cold, unforbidding atmosphere and sad consequences for our heroes beyond their control, there are many laughs to be had at Stan and Ollie's unsuccessful attempts to earn a living a s street musicians (playing "In The Good Old Summertime" to uninterested residents and passers-by) and a surprise freak joke to end the film. It is a tribute to Laurel and Hardy that they manage to produce humour from a story and setting that would be more suited to downbeat melodrama, but produce humour they do.

22.NIGHT OWLS (1930)

Breaking into a house or similar is one of the most common plotlines in a Laurel and Hardy film, used in the very early silent short Duck Soup (1927).As befits its title, Night Owls is almost set completely at night time, and has a rather splendid supporting cast, with Edgar Kennedy as an inept cop, Anders Randolph as the hard-faced police chief and James Finlayson as his accident-prone butler. The boys are vagrants forced by Kennedy to rob the Chief's house as they are on the "outs",making a total hash of opening and locking doors and windows, being spectacularly noisy while going about it. Kennedy is mostly absent from the film after the opening five minutes until the end, while Finlayson does not personally interact with the boys, he provides some uproarious moments, hopelessly ignorant at their antics downstairs as they rob the house. Notable as the debut of their celebrated "Ku-Ku" theme tune, the gags are predictable but very amusingly executed, in a pleasantly atmospheric studio set. Anders Randolph died just several months after the film was released, and Edgar Kennedy would soon be leaving the Hal Roach Studios to star in his "Average Man" series of short comedies for RKO, not appearing in another Laurel and Hardy film for 13 years.

21.CHICKENS COME HOME (1931)

A straight remake of the very early Love 'Em and Weep (1927) with ten minutes extra footage, this relentlessly stereotypes the female gender as either deeply suspicious, gossipy harpies, blackmailing shrews or even violent psychopaths. Ollie is coming up in the world as a Mayoral candidate, and the last thing he wants is a floozie like Mae Busch at her most vituperative exposed as an old flame.

There is all kinds of running about from most members of the cast, few of whom with the exception of Stan and Ollie are remotely likeable, with James Finlayson getting on the act as a blackmailing butler.It gets a bit strained on occasions but there are some hilarious moments involving various misunderstandings, subterfuges and misapprehensions, with the best of them being the boys trying to smuggle Mae out of the Hardy household, with Fin perhaps giving the most spectacular double take and fade away of his entire movie career as a bonus!

20.SCRAM! (1932)

Laurel and Hardy on their uppers again, this features some less familiar yet welcome foils such as growly-voiced Rychard Cramer, platinum blonde Vivian Oakland and the permanently inebriated Arthur Housman.It is very well constructed with the boys trying to help Housman start his car (why should someone so drunk be allowed to get behind the driving wheel is anyone's guess), arriving at his house where they can stay the night, finding out it isn't his house but that actually of Judge Cramer, with the boys getting his wife Ms Oakland drunk on gripe water, all in complete innocence, of course.

Directed by Ray McCarey, the much less known brother of Leo who played a big part in bringing Laurel and Hardy together at Roach, this is probably the former's best known film and the interplay with Housman at the beginning and Oakland in the bedroom (a bit nudge-nudge in the pre-code days, yet Stan and Ollie's naive characters make such impure thoughts redundant) are superbly handled, as is the menacing Cramer who comes across such decadence in atypical casting, as he usually played villains in low-budget B westerns and sometimes in crime melodramas, yet would on occasion play rough, aggressive types opposite comedians like L & H and WC Fields in The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933), where he even breaks down in tears during Fields' off key singing at one point.