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"

Me And My Pal Year: 1933 Directed by: Charles Rogers (and Lloyd French, uncredited) Duration: 19m DVD Availability: Try sendit.com (region 2 only) Viewpoint: "Where is Mr. Hardy?" "He’s right here. And he told me to tell yer that we’d just left… ten minutes ago." It’s always strange how history makes you judge Laurel and Hardy. While budgetary constraints and speed of filming meant that their shorts were nearly always in just one or two locations, having them spend an entire film doing a puzzle brings words like “minimalist” and “innovative” to the (jigsaw) table. Sadly, though, this one just doesn’t quite work somehow. It’s proficiently well done enough to earn it average marks, but I could quite comfortably sit through the whole thing without breaking a smile. I’m not altogether sure why this is. Maybe it’s something to do with the fact that Ollie is above his normal social standing. Whereas normally he plays a perpetual loser with delusions of grandeur, here he genuinely has that grandeur, heading the top of his company, having his own butler (named “Hives” as a possible reference to Duck Soup) and about to be married into the family of a wealthy magnate. Somehow this takes the edge off his usual persona, as him demanding “get out of my way!” to his butler and a taxi driver isn’t the cry of a delusional imbecile but the demand of someone high up the social ladder to a servant and blue collar worker. Maybe it’s just little things, like Nat Clifford very obviously playing both the butler and the voice on the radio, or the silly name for James Finlayson’s character. Stan and Ollie’s last professional appearance together was with the 1953 stage tour sketch Birds of a Feather, featuring a psychiatrist physician unsubtly named “Dr. Beserk”. So here we get Ollie about to marry into the family of Mr. Peter Cucumber. Actually, I suspect what it really could be is just the overall tone of unrealism. Seeing Ollie’s entire house get trashed in the middle of a brawl not only makes his trashing of the jigsaw ineffective as a follow-on, but it’s also totally without realistic motivation. Okay, okay, I’m analysing this one way too much, I know. It’s Laurel and Hardy, not Stanislavski, but without realism there’s no genuine humour. There are some twists on expectations: when Ollie asks Stan if he knows what a magnate is, instead of muttering something about it being a thing that sticks to metal objects, he claims, inexplicably, that it’s “a thing that eats cheese”. His ordering of a wreath to a wedding and delivery of the title quote is also tremendous, but generally this is one that could have been a first-rate character study – like Their First Mistake - and instead ends up as an unbelievable farce. Stan offers us hope at the conclusion, referring to the short’s backdrop of the depression: “Don’t worry – prosperity’s just around the corner.” Indeed it was.