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"

Swiss Miss Year: 1938 Story by: Jean Negulesco and Charles Rogers Written by: James Parrott, Felix Adler and Charles Melson Directed by: John G. Blystone Duration: 70m DVD Availability: Try sendit.com (region 2 only) Viewpoint: "For once in your life you’ve acted with impunity!" Swiss Miss, perhaps one of the lesser-remembered features, has recently come into the limelight again after it was revealed that it was a favourite of Adolph Hitler’s. While it’s long been rumoured that he put Charlie Chaplin at the top of his death list in retaliation for The Great Dictator, on the 21st of June 1938 he ordered a screening of this film (two days later it was Way Out West!) with the observation that “The Fuhrer is in a playful mood after the film” from Martin Bormann. What’s notable is that 1939 was the first year since their genesis that Laurel and Hardy didn’t release any product at all. Come September of that year Hitler had took it upon himself to invade Poland – coincidence? But enough tasteless musings. This newly revealed development perhaps surprises, as it was only two years earlier that Nazi Germany had banned The Bohemian Girl, believing it to be subversive. On a related note, Hal Roach was coming into this product with fingers burnt after he’d unsuccessfully tried to woo Mussolini’s son into making co-Italian productions of Verdi Operas on film. Maybe Swiss Miss goes to prove that the leader of the Third Reich didn’t really have that good a sense of humour, as this is a marginally below-par Laurel and Hardy vehicle. With Roach there seems to be two types of Laurel and Hardy features: the good natured, extended Stan and Ollie comedies (Our Relations, Block-Heads, et al) and the ones that have the duo supported by largely unrelated musical numbers and straight acts (Fra Diavolo, The Bohemian Girl…) This is the case here, with only Adia Kuznetzoff as the manic chef managing to find a common linkage with the boys. Even so, he still generally plays it as an acting role, rather than an overacting role as Fin and Charlie Hall would do. With this in mind, Swiss Miss is rather like watching a variety show with Laurel and Hardy brought on as “turns”. It’s a shame, but Stan and Ollie don’t deliver their best performances here, which doesn’t help when they’re given weak material. Stan, going through another divorce, seems a little detached, while Ollie was receiving his own domestic worries and is unusually over the top here. For once his shy responses to being in love (the infamous tie-twiddle, the bashful smile) are not endearing or charming, but forced and pantomimic. What perhaps make this version of Oliver so unpalatable is that he’s so unlikeable in this one, a boorish snob who chastises waiters, rather than the perpetual loser with delusions of grandeur that he normally plays. There’s a marked difference. The simple-minded script doesn’t allow for three dimensions in his characterisation, and so Hardy overplays his stock of mannerisms, forcing it into caricature. Perhaps most unsettling is that he doesn’t allow us into his world, his every look towards us virtually excised by the editor’s scissors. As a result we’re left watching him without him calling upon our sympathies… the final result doesn’t produce a pleasant image. The narrative is linked, though as the main plot is the serious stuff and the comedy stuff only tenuously joined, then it does feel like a series of sketches. Probably the funniest are Stan and Ollie’s final fight with the chef, and Stan famously pretending to be lost in a snow storm (chicken feathers) in order to get a Saint Bernard’s brandy cache. Most inspired has to be the segment with the musical notes trapped in bubbles, though sadly the main centrepiece – Charles Gemora, back in another ape costume after The Chimp (1932), inexplicably tackling the boys on a rope bridge with a piano. Gorillas aside, this does bring to mind two of their most famous shorts, not least in its supplanting of The Music Box (which in turn was derived from Hats Off) into a fantastical setting. Yet where just under a decade earlier Stan and Ollie had really stood atop a three-storey scaffolding above a 150 foot building for Liberty (1929), here it’s seen as enough to have them in the studio hamming it up in front of painted backdrops and wholly unconvincing back projection. Certainly far from their finest, then, though the boys would still have enough in reserve to sparkle later the same year with the superior Block-Heads. That said, any scene where the boys join in the song – and the songs are very well performed, just incongruous with the genre – is hilarious, particularly the serenade.