The real horror of Laurel & Hardy can be found not in the gothic of Do Detectives Think? or Habeas Corpus, but rather in power relations. When Oliver receives news of a sizeable inheritance, Stan wails desperately: “What will become of me?”. Dry your tears, Stan! Ollie cannot give up having you by his side… you can be his butler. No longer friends united in poverty, but rather master and servant. The result is the duo’s cruellest and most unexpected film, in which Oliver plays a genuine tyrant ready to play the dirtiest of tricks. All of the gags are the result of sadistic and violent gestures and contain a physical and psychological charge that makes a mockery of the slightest hint of rebellion (or healthy attempt to break free). We can’t believe our eyes – and nor, in the end, can Stan, who is incapable of resigning himself to a friendship betrayed. We vainly grasp at the notion that it might all be nothing more than a nightmare. When even this most tenuous of hopes evaporates, we do not laugh, we cannot. Laurel & Hardy do not dance together in order to undermine the very fabric of society but rather perform a toxic paso doble that reflects class conflict. In their second year, the duo prove that they are already mature enough to explore alternative endings, unsettling multiverses, parallel dimensions. There is no way out, only anger and frustration, in a suffocating and unjust film in which even a pie in the face can assume sinister connotations.

Alessandro Criscitiello

At a time when racist and socially problematic attitudes were casually flaunted (see Their Purple Moment and We Faw Dawn), Laurel & Hardy’s deconstruction of machismo (and militarism) looks like the flagship of their entire output. This is still true today – above all today. If the opening (vaguely) celebrates the campaigns of the American navy in the style of a mock newsreel, irreverence is just around the corner. Stan and Ollie are sailors on leave who strut about in a rental car with a bluster they can ill afford. They do not know how to drive; they are not even capable of unlocking a chewing gum vending machine, let alone emerging victorious from a fight with Charlie Hall (the “little nemesis” in many of the duo’s films). Two girls in a fix (Thelma Hill and Ruby Blaine) provide the ideal opportunity for Oliver to show off some of his renowned gestures, which cry out “leave it to me”, without the need for intertitles. It will be up to the women to physically defend the two little boys, as expected. This series of gags is functional to the climax that arrives in the very elaborate second part of the film: a traffic jam which waiting to be transformed into a devastating conflict. This war waged by a stupid and nasty humanity with a self-destructive tendency coincides with Hal Roach’s technical peak: no longer pies in the face, but a sumptuous chaos of wrecked cars. The dissolution of Fordism!

Alessandro Criscitiello