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"

Pardon Us Year: 1931 Directed by: James Parrott Duration: 67m DVD Availability Try sendit.com (region 2 only) Viewpoint: "Can we take your order for a couple of cases?" While Laurel and Hardy had performed a cameo in the missing The Rogue Song a year earlier, Pardon Us was their first feature-length vehicle for themselves. Further cameos and shorts-generously-extended-to-four-reelers (Beau Hunks) aside, it was the first of twenty-three feature length movies they would appear in. As around 45% of these pictures were made away from Hal Roach, then they form an extremely variable quality rate from two or three classics, eleven average-or-thereabouts works and nine that are almost completely unwatchable. Pardon Us? Well – great title aside – it falls very much into the “average” bracket, a film that’s a blend of underdeveloped comic vignettes, hackneyed, below-par gags, arguably offensive overtones and genuine brilliance. Thankfully, for the purposes of a review it never shows all four elements at the same time, and the first element occurs largely at the beginning. Taking away how contrived and forced Stan’s “buzzing tooth” appears (this is no magical conjuring trick with flames from his fingers or shadows pulling blinds, this is just the actor very obviously and deliberately making the silly noise himself), the stilted, timing-astray pace seems to suggest that they didn’t know if they could last for over an hour unless things developed s-l-o-w-l-y. Sketches go nowhere, such as Ollie accidentally soaking a guard, which cuts to another scene without reprise. Thankfully, the pace does pick up fairly soon, though the scene with James Finlayson as a prison teacher is absolutely dire. Having Stan and Ollie not even be able to count three into nine, or jokes about there being no “I” (eye) in a needle are way, way beneath them. Then we have the offensive overtones. There’s plenty of elements of threatening with knifes and implied would-be rape (a scene which isn’t included in colorised version – a version which, for once, is watchable rather than dreadful), but the real topic here is race. Nearly seventy-five years on, even in a Farrelly Brothers, post-pc environment, it’s still hard to get used to Stan and Ollie “blacked up”, complete with white lips. Ollie does, at least, get to deliver a soothing rendition of “Lazy Moon”, with real-life stories that he joined Coburn’s Minstrels at the age of eight deemed to be somewhere between fact and a publicist’s invention that Hardy went along with. Yet we still get the problems of race, with Stan and Ollie using dirt and oil to replace their washed-off disguises, and Stan mistaking two prisoners – one black, one Asian – as the radio "blackface" double-act, Amos and Andy. What is the film trying to say? That Stan, naïve as he was, would genuinely believe in a questionable gimmick? Or was it an input of Stan’s, who – history would inform us – had arguably less of a open world-view than the southern gentleman Hardy? Oliver married a Jewish girl in a time of great anti-semetism, while Stan would go on to invent the appalling bestial stereotypes in Babes In Toyland. It’s perhaps unimportant to judge a film on such elements today, and just chalk it up as a world away, a reasonably isolated curio in Laurel and Hardy movies. That said, when a disguised Stan calls Hardy “Oliver” in front of the governor – then changes it to “Sambo” - you would have to try hard not to be shocked in the 21st century. So, the brilliance? The ultimate pay-off of the title quote, the “I can’t see a thing, it’s dark in here” scene, Stan accidentally setting off a riot, pretty much every scene with Walter Long and – blackface aside – their song and dance routine, a blueprint for many which would follow, including Beau Hunks just four months later. On the subject of trivia, this was the only one of their features to be performed as a foreign language version, the Spanish version of which includes a gag deleted from the English take, where Stan has their prison photos as a souvenir. On the subject of the film itself, then it’s very much a mixed bag, with subplots that go nowhere and scenes that don’t always come off. Yet, overall, Stan and Ollie win out... just.