Silent Films: pre-team 1921-1927 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1927 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1928 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1929 Laurel and Hardy sound films (alphabetical order): A-Haunting We Will Go Air Raid Wardens Another Fine Mess Any Old Port! Atoll K (aka Utopia) Babes In Toyland Beau Hunks Be Big! Below Zero Berth Marks The Big Noise Block-Heads Blotto The Bohemian Girl Bonnie Scotland Brats The Bullfighters Busy Bodies Chickens Come Home - The Chimp A Chump At Oxford Come Clean County Hospital The Dancing Masters The Devil's Brother aka Fra Diavolo Dirty Work The Fixer Uppers The Flying Deuces Fra Diavolo aka The Devil's Brother Going Bye-Bye! Great Guns Helpmates Hog Wild The Hoose-Gow Jitterbugs Laughing Gravy The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case The Live Ghost Me And My Pal Men O'War The Midnight Patrol The Music Box Night Owls Nothing But Trouble Oliver The Eighth One Good Turn Our Relations Our Wife Pack Up Your Troubles Pardon Us Perfect Day Saps At Sea Scram! Sons of the Desert Swiss Miss Their First Mistake Them Thar Hills They Go Boom! Thicker Than Water Tit For Tat Towed In A Hole Twice Two Unaccustomed As We Are Utopia (aka Atoll K) Way Out West Specials: Cameos Cartoons For Love Or Mummy Laurel and Hardy Memories "Stan"

A-Haunting We Will Go Year: 1942 Written by: Lou Breslow Story by: Lou Breslow and Stanley Rauh Directed by: Alfred Werker Duration: 64m Availability (VHS Only): Try sendit.com Viewpoint: "They might get us some laughs in the show." "Yeah, we could sure use a few too." Sadly, they go wanting. I’ll never get over my original review of The Bullfighters, where – after seeing them just once each – I described each post-Roach film in terms of laughs per minute. Okay, it’s obviously a sarcastic way to put the films down, but even so, I was almost insanely generous. Or maybe just insane. For this film I had it chalked up as one laugh every five minutes for the first half, one laugh every fifteen in the second. So that makes it, what? Eight, nine, laughs? Okay, that’s no compliment, but I’m left wondering how I got above four. That’s not to say that A-Haunting (what’s it got to do with haunting?) We Will Go is that bad a film per se, and, truth be told, I can’t find any hate in my heart for it. Maybe this is partly nostalgia, as I remember watching isolated clips from it with my Grandmother (or “Nana” as I knew her) in some compilation show, and being thrilled by them. Come on, I was about six – I once thought The Chimp was the best Laurel and Hardy film of all time, what did I know? Stan and Ollie are categorically the only “funny” roles in this screenplay, all the rest of the characters being straight characters. Unfortunately not only does this mean things drag when the stars aren’t on screen, but it’s also hindered by the fact that the supporting actors are so flat and unenthusiastic. Believe it or not, I reckon the best guest actor in the whole thing is Dante, The Magician. A real magician by that stage name, he gets shared top billing with the boys for this one, and it’s obvious he’s far from comfortable with acting on screen. However, there’s a certain earnestness and … well, I wouldn’t like to say enthusiasm, exactly… but a will to take part that puts him a notch above his peers. The actual plot involves some criminals who want to transport one of their number across country in a coffin (please don’t ask me why they want to do this, that question assumes I was paying attention) and Stan and Ollie getting mixed up in the plot and Dante’s stage act. This does, unfortunately, mean that they play second fiddle (or snake charm) to the magic act, and their dignity (and the film’s) takes a nose dive as soon as they have to dress up as stereotype Turks. Stan’s performance becomes so like a half-assed parody of himself towards the end that even Bronson Pinchot could have done a better job. (And if you don’t know what I’m referring to, then see this site’s review of For Love Or Mummy). In fact, this is arguably the worst performance Stan ever gave - flat, lifeless, even wooden in some scenes. Ollie can disguise it, but with Stan you can blatantly see that his heart just isn't in it. Yet while even at their peak they were not exactly youthful (mid 30s to mid 40s), even Hal Roach’s make-up wouldn’t have kept patching them up for much longer. Okay, we’re still just two years on from the last Roach work, but Stan’s 51 and Ollie’s 49, and every time one of them takes a tumble (even if it’s their stuntman) you still panic rather than laugh along. One of the nice things about this one is that, rather than using old ideas as most of the Fox stories did (okay, the new ideas weren’t worth shouting about, but at least they tried) they give us what could almost be termed intertextual references to older works. (Notice how many times I’ve used brackets in this review? Distracting, ain’t it?) (Oh, wait, I just did it again, didn’t I?) So we have a double take at a statue with a back-to-front abdominal area (Wrong Again, 1929), a reference to having been in a lodge (Sons of the Desert, 1933) and a bad attempt at hitchhiking (On The Wrong Trek, 1936). It’s not exactly high praise, but it’s more than this film deserves.