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"

Pack Up Your Troubles Year: 1932 Directed by: George Marshall/Ray McCarey Duration: 65m DVD Availability Try sendit.com (region 2 only) Viewpoint: "There you are. I knew you would take that selfish viewpoint!" I always think that watching Pack Up Your Troubles is like seeing a brand new Laurel and Hardy movie: it’s so unmemorable that every time is like the first. Tell the truth, I always misremember half the events from the similarly war-themed (though far, far superior) Block-Heads as being in this one. Sadly, they’re not, leaving us with Stan and Ollie approaching a black man to ask if a white girl is his daughter the only bit that genuinely sticks in my mind. Still, it ain’t bad, and is quite charming in places. I erroneously suggest that the following feature film Fra Diavolo was their first “non contemporaneous” in-character roles, but of course this one is set during and after the first world war. Occasionally mawkish and sentimental, with naggingly unresolved plot points (why does “swell guy” Eddie dislike his own parents so much?) it’s also extremely violent in places. Richard Craymer plays a far too realistic wife beater and (implied) child beater. In order to overcome him and his cronies Stan and Ollie resort to pouring boiling hot water all over them. What next – Stan and Ollie use a nail bomb? Tellingly, the sequence was exorcised from re-release prints until the 1990s. What really troubles the film is having Stan and Ollie attempting to get laughs from the first World War. There are some things that comedians of the era – particularly apolitical ones – can’t get laughs from, and that’s one of them. Expecting us to laugh while their friends lie dead (unseen) is too big a step up, even for them. A caption informs us that “Eddie Smith’s little girl is waiting – and longing – for her daddy, who will never return-” This then cuts to Jacquie Lyn, one of the Our Gang girls, desperately seeking her father. Add to this lacklustre direction (main director Marshall does much better acting as the mad Chef), lots of continuity problems and almost constant stock music and this is a film that has “could have been so much better” written all the way through it. Characters like Eddie Smith are played as proper roles, a marked contrast to the boys’ left side of reality characterisations. In the sense of drama then Pack Up Your Troubles does work well towards the end, as Stan and Ollie have never seemed to have been quite so on the wrong side of the law, and with quite so many odds stacked against them. Yet you sense that maybe Stan, with his love of the perverse, would have preferred this one to have ended like The Bullfighters. But… it’s not awful. There are plenty of chucklesome moments throughout, even just the way Ollie pronounces “non-cha-lont.” It’s just the thought of what might have been. Take the scene with them having their own burger van. The bit with the cats is amusing and the bit with Ollie in the back is okay, but where does it go? The film’s plot first, comedy later and never fully comes off. Having said that, Their First Mistake, also by Marshall, is something of a classic, but that was a confined short reliant on dialogue. (He also did Towed In A Hole, regarded as a classic by many, but leaves me cold).Take the scene where Ollie has a fight with Craymer’s character, or where he’s stuck in the top of the tank. Never realistic enough to be convincing or exaggerated enough to be funny, it just comes off as looking inept and needing another shoot. Sure, we all know they had stuntmen, dummies and the like, but sometimes the art of extreme overplaying could compensate this. But the somewhat uncertain movements when Stan’s supposed to be driving that tank, or Craymer very obviously isn’t connecting with Ollie’s chin just make it this side of feeble. I feel as if I’d been too harsh on this one. It’s not a favourite, the scene with Stan being read a bedtime story is far too self-consciously “cute” and it’s clearly the weakest of the Hal Roach feature films. My negativity is borne from frustration at how good this could have been with a little more care, and a lot more refinement on the plot. I did laugh all the way through, there’s plenty of amusing moments. But this is merely a workable film enlivened by constant pieces of business, rather than a well-rounded, lovingly crafted vehicle to showcase comic genius. Disappointing.