THE LAUREL AND HARDY SOUND SHORTS:Ranking 14-11

14.BRATS (1930)

A film which does not have an especially high laugh quota, but it ranks among the team's most charming and likeable efforts, mainly because they play their own children in convincing fashion, with good production values and some memorable individual gags.

Laurel and Hardy's characters were essentially naive and childlike, so it is interesting to watch the contrast in behaviour between Stan and Ollie and their sons Stanley and Oliver;Ollie is reasonably assertive and authoritative as a father while Stan is mostly passive; their sons play with building blocks and do silly things as children do whilst their fathers carry on as normal in their well-meaning ineptitude when they try to play draughts or have a game of pool.

Brats is most familiar in its reissued version from the mid-late 30's; the original version is now widely available with the background music markedly different than the reissue. The latter version with updated compositions by LeRoy Shield is far superior as it punctuates Stanley and Oliver's antics with music that does genuinely recall childhood, adding to the film's considerable charm. The said antics of the boys are sometimes a trifle overstretched, but there are great moments abound such as Ollie eating cue chalk instead of a marshmallow, Stan's philosophical comment that "You can lead a horse to water, but a pencil must be lead", a waterlogged finale and best of all, Ollie's hilariously exaggerated fall down a flight of stairs.

13.COME CLEAN (1931)

The majority of Laurel and Hardy's sound shorts are carefully if not "methodically" paced (as William K.Everson usually described them), but Come Clean is an exception to this rule, its initial stages in familiar mode, but it soon develops into a frantic, fast-paced effort which is a little alien and unusual by their established codes and conventions. There was still three years to go before the strict production code came into being in American mainstream film making, and Come Clean also has some rather daring aspects that have adult themes implicitly stated, such as Mae Busch's character Kate who is quite obviously a prostitute, and a mentally unbalanced virtual blackmailer at that, wanted by the police, with the boys forced to take her to Ollie's apartment after saving her from a suicide attempt where she was decidedly ungrateful and causes all kinds of trouble for them before the law catches up with her.

Stan also tells a risque joke at one point about a "travelling salesman" which further veers the film further away from U certificate territory more into PG at least. It begins rather innocuously, with a reworking of the opening scene from the silent Should Married Men Go Home? which improves on the original, Stan wishing for some ice cream, buying some from vendor Charlie Hall, then encountering Mae as the most shrewish harridan imaginable. 

Come Clean has a very complicated, convoluted story line and does not rely on a single situation as many of their best shorts do but several plots at once. This could have got in the way of their partnership and gags, and threatens to do on occasional moments, but the two strands intertwine very well in an effort that would possibly had benefited with a few minutes footage;  Be Big!  for example, stretched its one-joke premise far too much and may have worked slightly better with ten minutes less footage, as the two-reel format employed with so much story here made a brisk, breathless pace rather inevitable to fit everything in. It works very well for the most part, but the team rarely employed such a style again.

12.THEIR FIRST MISTAKE (1932)

Another in their list of somewhat risque pre-code shorts, Their First Mistake is not always universally appreciated by all L & H buffs, as there is a slight perception of homosexuality early on when it is implied that Ollie thinks more of Stan than of wife Mae Busch, being sued for divorce via process server Billy Gilbert as the main correspondent! It recalls some of their set-bound early talkies, being filmed entirely in studio settings, but the comedians were now completely assured within the format, with the opening conflict with Mae, then the boys adopting a baby and having to take charge when she departs the household. Stan says this is none of his business, leading to some outstanding comic acting from Ollie as a virtual "single mother".

This is all very clever, offbeat and funny, but the final scenes where the boys look after the child have divided opinion, looked on as inconclusive with no defined ending. I myself think the incidents depicted are logical and possibly even funnier, with some great verbal ("Make a noise quietly") and visual (Stan feeding the baby milk from his own "breast" area!) gags and ferocious slapstick.

11.ANOTHER FINE MESS (1930)

A far superior remake of the very early, embryonic silent short Duck Soup (1927), the film that perhaps most propagated the persistent myth regarding their most famous catchphrase from Ollie, further emphasised even in this film where he actually says  "Here's another nice mess..." etc. to Stan at one point.

The former and latter films where both based a music hall sketch written by Stan Laurel's father, and it often comes across as a film adaptation of a drawing room farce, but this is not to the film's detriment. Slapstick is kept at a minimum with a greater concentration on dialogue and character, less frantically paced than Duck Soup but the dialogue is pointed and funny, the supporting cast of the delightful Thelma Todd, the upper-class English silly ass Charles Gerrard (actually an Irishman in real life) and the inevitable James Finlayson greatly add to the fun, with the best moment being that of the ancient "Call Me a Cab" joke, which was old even in 1930, but it is said that the secret of great comedy is timing and how you say or perform a piece of comic material. The best comedians can make the oldest and most cliched of gags fresh, funny and hilarious through such abilities, and if you want an example of this, just watch how Stan and Ollie handle the "Call Me a Cab" joke that still proves that whether a gag is original or hackneyed, they are probably the greatest laughter makers of all in any medium.