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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" | Fra Diavolo aka The Devil's Brother Year: 1933 Written by: Jeanie MacPherson from Daniel Auber's 1830 comic opera Directed by: Hal Roach and Charles Rogers Duration: 89m DVD Availability: Try amazon (region 1)/sendit.com (region 2) ![]() Viewpoint: "You're Spivved!" An unusual turn of phrase that isn't used that widely any more - if at all - it's Hardy's reaction to a drunken Stan in what is probably the film's highlight. When Universal Pictures released a wonderfully chic boxset of all the Hal Roach Laurel and Hardy comedies, they sadly omitted this little-seen operatta (as well as Babes in Toyland and Bonnie Scotland), making the 21 disc set incomplete. That's "little seen" by Laurel and Hardy standards, incidentally, as to the best of my knowledge this one has never been aired on UK television, and is potentially even more obscure than the silent shorts or the post-Roach endeavours. Produced from February 4th - March 4th 1933, it had a reported 27 minutes of Roach-shot drama hacked out of it, with the Charles Rogers-helmed Laurel and Hardy sequences left untouched. It's due to this that the film is so watchable, as Stan and Ollie - or Stanlio and Ollio as their 18th century counterparts are known here, the first time they'd played non-contempraneous roles "in character" - are on screen virtually throughout. It has to be said that their performance isn't exactly vintage L & H, but often that's just due to overfamilarity with the rest of their canon. In the following year's short, Oliver The Eighth, Stan would garble his train of thought, an hysterical development. Here the far less well-known Devil's Brother has him do it early, with "If we became rich, and we robbed the poor and we gave them to the bandits... we could start at the top and we could get to the bottom without working hard any more. We can't go wrong. It's the law of conversation." Unfortunately, to anyone without a filmography to hand, it looks as if The Devil's Brother has merely reprised the short, rather than the other way round. There are some inspired moments, including two or three laugh-out-loud bits towards the end, and Kneesie Earsie Nosey really is a difficult thing to do. The film is also surprisingly high in sexual allusion and threatened knife mutilation. While earlier I slated the dreadful Utopia for having jokes about hanging, here it works brilliantly, with Ollio complaining to Stanio about his tying his noose (under duress) too tight. Based on the 1830 operatta Fra Diavolo, this was the boy's third full-length feature (discounting their bulked-up cameos in The Rogue Song) and is more often known under the title of The Devil's Brother. Other titles have emerged, such as Bogus Bandits and several when it has been reworked for compilations. A first attempt to try something different, I get the feeling that Fra Diavolo rewards repeat viewings...
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