We Faw Down

WE FAW DOWN

Aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Sound format: Silent

(Black and white - Short film)

Stan 'n' Ollie get mixed up with a couple of floozies (Kay Deslys and Vera White) after setting out to visit a theatre which burns down in their absence! Needless to say, their tyrannical wives (Vivien Oakland and Bess Flowers) are not amused...

Leo McCarey's OK comedy laid the narrative framework for William Seiter's masterpiece SONS OF THE DESERT (1934), with L&H playing brow-beaten victims of circumstance, forced to tell a monstrous lie which backfires in spectacular fashion. Much of it is very funny, especially the scene in which Stan is teased by Deslys, leading to a violent game of push and shove. However, some of the fun is undercut by Oakland and Flowers, playing their roles completely straight, which adds an element of unpleasantness to the 'henpecked husband' scenario. Originally released in the UK as WE SLIP UP.

This is a fairly obscure Laurel & Hardy comedy which deserves to be better known, for while it's no masterpiece it is quite funny and entertaining, as well as unusual in some respects. We Faw Down is one of the earliest explorations of Stan & Ollie's relationships with their wives, and in 1933 it would serve as a blue-print for their best Battle of the Sexes feature, Sons of the Desert. It plays rather like a silent version of "The Honeymooners." Imagine Ralph Kramden & Ed Norton in this scenario: the boys tell their wives a fib in order to sneak out and play poker, but en route to the game they manage to get entangled with a boxer's flirty girlfriend; later, after narrowly escaping from the murderous boxer, they make matters worse for themselves by blatantly lying about the whole episode to their wives, who are now furious. The Gleason & Carney parallel with Laurel & Hardy has long been noticed, but it's especially apparent here, although in Laurel & Hardy's world it appears that forgiveness and understanding are harder to come by than in the Kramdens' apartment: at the end of this film, Mrs. Hardy is chasing the guys through an alley with a shotgun, firing at them. It's hard to imagine Alice Kramden doing that.

At any rate, what we have here is a Roaring Twenties sitcom, nicely photographed (by George Stevens, no less), smoothly directed (by Leo McCarey, no less), and beautifully well acted by the entire cast, Stan and Ollie in particular. At their best, Laurel & Hardy are so natural we don't even think of them as actors, but what better definition is there of first-rate acting? As actors playing off each other, the guys are at the top of their game in this short. Watch the interplay of their facial expressions in the opening scene as they conspire to fool their wives -- they couldn't fool grade school kids, but it's fun to watch them attempt to be sly. And later, when the boys are semi-innocently ensnared by two good time gals, there is a delightful extended sequence in which Stan is playfully tormented by the boxer's girlfriend, to his mounting annoyance and Ollie's growing amusement.

This is where the film gets into unusual territory, at least for viewers accustomed to the later, more child-like Laurel & Hardy. Although their characterizations are essentially in place in this early short, Stan and Ollie are distinctly more grown-up in their response to the sordid situation they get themselves into; they're simpletons to be sure, but grown-ups nonetheless. They're not entirely innocent, and they exchange wicked conspiratorial grins throughout. Even in the final sequence, when their story unravels and they stand revealed as liars, they can barely conceal their impish amusement over the whole thing -- and that's something you won't find later on, as they became more infantile and more fearful of their wives. They do pay for their misbehavior here, but at least they get some kicks along the way, and that's kind of a treat. You might say that We Faw Down presents Laurel & Hardy at their naughtiest.

Casting Note: In this film Mrs. Laurel is played by Bess Flowers, later to become famous -- to movie buffs, that is -- as the Queen of the Hollywood Extras. She appeared in scores of movies throughout the entire Golden Age of the studio system, usually as an elegantly attired dress extra. (Just check out this woman's filmography, it's amazing!) We Faw Down provides Ms. Flowers with a rare opportunity to play comedy in a featured role, and gives viewers a rare chance to get a look at this attractive lady for more than a few seconds. It's nice to see that she could hold her own with two of the top comedians in the business.

This film features Laurel and Hardy in a very familiar plot. As is often the case, the boys go out to play and lie to the wives about it--with disastrous results. This type of situation was featured in several films made by the team (such as THEIR PURPLE MOMENT and BLOTTO) and was remade very closely in SONS OF THE DESERT. In fact, after Laurel and Hardy, this same plot was reworked on "The Honeymooners" and even "The Flintstones"!

In this film, Stan and Ollie go out for a good time and meet two ladies who eventually ask them back to their apartment. What they don't know is that the wives suspect the boys are playing around and one of the lady has a boyfriend who is a professional boxer! The wives actually catch them in the act but Stan and Ollie don't know it--and there is a very, very long segment where the boys make up lie after lie to explain themselves. This leads to an expectedly violent confrontation. The end was cute and repeated very closely in BLOCKHEADS. While there's a lot of familiar material in this short, it is very well done and funny.

Stan Laurel and the writers for the Laurel and Hardy series of shorts and features on occasion reworked their movies from the pair's previous films. A good example is their December 1928's "We Faw Down." The story concerns the two falsely telling their wives they're going to a movie, but they're really playing poker at their friend's house. They get sidetracked helping two women get one of their hats wedged underneath a car. Laurel and Hardy's charitable act leads to a messy situation with one of the ladies' husband. When the two wives hear about what happened, there's heck to pay. If this sounds like Laurel and Hardy's 1933's "Sons of the Desert," this is exactly the outline of their classic feature film.

In addition, 1932's 'Their First Mistake' copies the telephone gag from "We Faw Down," pretending the call is from the pair's new boss. There were also scenes in "We Faw Down" that didn't make the final edit, but ended up in their next release, 1929's 'Liberty.'

Oliver Hardy told the pair's team of writers the tale he heard was from his laundress that spawned the "We Faw Down's" plot. It was a rare instance where Hardy's suggestion resulted in a storyline. Most of their movies' inspiration came from Laurel, who sketched a majority of the team's screenplays. Years of experience in comedy made Stan adept in shaping his writers' scripts, improving and adding a number of hilarious sequences. His working sessions were loud affairs with several writers in a conference room where each attempted to top the others by suggesting increasingly outrageous situations.

"We Faw Down" was Leo McCarey's first short directing Laurel and Hardy. He claimed he was responsible in pairing the two as a team the previous year (1927). McCarey's name was always listed in the credits as the 'Supervising Director.' For the first time he found out just as other directors before him that Laurel essentially ran the movie set. There was an unwitting understanding the head director always deferred to Stan. Hal Roach, their producer, said if Laurel didn't like what the director was telling them, "the director didn't say 'Well, you're going to do it anyway.' That was understood." Laurel would suggest the direction the scene was going to take, and the director picked up on the comic's idea and ran with it.

Just watched this Laurel & Hardy comedy on Hulu as linked from IMDb. In this one, Stan & Ollie are trying to get to a poker game but their wives seemed determined to keep them at home. So when someone from there calls, Ollie takes it and addresses him as Boss so he could fool the spouses that he and Stan are going to the Orpheum Theater to see a live show with him. After they leave, they meet a couple of ladies after one of them misplaces a hat...I'll stop there and just say while there's not too much slapstick here (though the give-and-take between Stan and one of the ladies was pretty funny), there is some highly amusing pantomime between the boys when they try to describe what they saw in the show as the wives can only grimace at what they know are bald-faced lies. Don't want to reveal much more than that so I'll just say I recommend We Faw Down. P.S. On YouTube, there's an "extended" version which puts nearly the entirety of Laurel & Hardy's next short, Liberty, in the middle of it. This is obviously because those scenes were originally part of this short but had to be cut for time constraints.