Men O'War

A LAUREL & HARDY Comedy Short.

Sailors Stan & Ollie, two MEN O'WAR, are on shore leave. While strolling through the park, they meet & escort two silly young women. After a financial contretemps at the soda fountain, the Boys initiate a rowdy donnybrook on the boat pond.

A hilarious little film, with a delightful sense of spontaneity, as if the performers were extemporizing much of their dialogue. This short is also refreshing in that the plot takes place entirely out of doors. Highlight: bedlam in the boat. The knickers sequence shows that this film was produced pre-Production Code. That's James Finlayson as the soda fountain/boat rental manager; Anne Cornwall & Gloria Greer as the young women; and Charlie Hall as the man in the canoe.

The duo are back again, this time as sailors wooing to equally dumb girls. It's got the usual slapstick and facial expressions that make the viewer laugh but in addition to that, it's got some witty dialogues too. The bar scene where Hardy selfishly tries to get out of paying is downright hilarious. The slapstick regarding the boat where the duo try to row out but end up rotating in one spot, drags a little but the sequence thereafter, that leads to a 'catastrophe' is hilarious. I kept wondering, OK now the boat's going to sink until it eventually does. The underwear confusion in the beginning was another laugh-out-loud sequence and I'm glad they didn't overdo it by using clichés. That sequence could have ended with Laurel or Hardy handing over the underwear to the girls followed by an embarrassing scream but thankfully that was avoided and the plot continued well. Overall, it is a well executed movie. A nice little funny film.

Two sailors meet two equally less-intelligent chicks and with a single tiny coin they manage to produce another quality catastrophe. This is how you take the most out of the situation! One hapless situation follows after another, and when you see what kind of sailors these two are you'll think what kind of Captain let them to ruin Navy's honor. When they manage to get the two chicks into the bar you'll know that something is going to happen when the old grim-face Finlayson is seen playing the bartender.

Everything works fine in this small flick, the total chaos that eventually happens doesn't start too early, though unfortunately it feels a bit prolonged one. But before the lousy bit, you have been given a sharp reminder on how good these masters of banal catastrophes were also verbally.

Sailors on leave, Laurel & Hardy try to impress two girls they meet in a park in this delightful, early sound short.

After misfiring in their first two sound shorts, Laurel & Hardy start to regain their stride in this short film. There is much to commend here. The scene with the boys meeting the girls is very cute, and the misunderstanding about a lost garment was surprisingly risqué for the time. The scene at the soda shop, where the boys, broke as usual, try to marshal their resources to buy drinks for the girls is also quite amusing. The appearance longtime foil Jim Finlayson as the soda jerk adds to the humor of the scene. In the second reel, the boys take the girls out on a small lake in a rowboat which leads to a typical tit-for-tat fight with their fellow boaters. This sequence isn't as funny as similar battles in "Two Tars" or "You're Darn Tootin'," but it shows that the boys are back on the right track.

One of my favorite shorts of this period. I think it benefited from some nice dialogue that actually seemed written. In their first two films, the dialogue seemed too perfunctorily or ad- libbed. Here, for the first time, they seem to be exploring the true possibilities of sound.

Laurel & Hardy are in their sailor outfits again, although there's really no need for them to be other than to emphasise their ineptitude in the second part of the film, which takes place on a boating lake. They come across a pair of bloomers and mistakenly believe they belong to one of a pair of young ladies they meet in the park. Of course, they don't belong to the ladies, but the boys realise this before they can embarrass themselves. That fact alone is an indicator of the high quality of the writing here; a lesser writer would have had the boys making asses of themselves, but the more satisfying pay-off is gained from the audience's sense of relief combined with the idea of what could have happened.

The boys take the girls for a soda. The clerk here is their old nemesis James Finlayson, but he doesn't really have a lot to do here other than squint suspiciously at the boys through one eye and say 'doh!' (nearly sixty years before Homer). Of course they don't have enough money and Ollie decides he and Stan will have to share one between them. You probably know how that works out, and the simplicity of Stan's line is filled with the kind of crackpot – but understandable – logic that typifies Laurel & Hardy's humour.

The ending's a variation on a theme they had used many times before but it still works because it *is* a variation rather than a rip off. This one's definitely worth a look.