45 Minutes from Hollywood

A lightning introduction to the art of moviemaking as a rube comes to town with his mortgage payment, “that old stuff” about making a holdup look like a movie set takes him in long enough to knock him out, dress him in travesty, put the police and a Hollywood Hotel detective (wearing only a towel) on his tracks, with a starving actor or two along the way and a fire extinguisher in his pants.

 

Duck Soup

A couple of ducks on the dodge hide out in a mansion, rent it to an English lord and start to clean it out when Col. Blood returns for his bow and arrow.

They wind up serving a hose for the Forest Service at a wildfire.

 

Slipping Wives

A society painter (his latest has live models for The Rape of the Sabine Women) neglects his wife, she hires the paint deliveryman to make him jealous.

Samson and Delilah is the tale that is told by the hireling, introduced as a novelist of fairy stories. “Forty thousand Philadelphians poked his eyes out.”

The husband gets in on the act, feigning jealousy with a wink to the camera.

 

Love ‘em and Weep

The silent version of Chickens Come Home—, with Finlayson as a businessman whose former mistress comes calling.

No politics, all business.

 

Why Girls Love Sailors

Because the brutes are easily led by the nose (cp. Lachman’s Our Relations). Fisherman Laurel gypped out of his girl leads a mutiny against first mate Hardy, the shanghaiing captain receives a visitation from the wife in another port.

 

Sugar Daddies

A significant variant of Love ‘em and Weep and Chickens Come Home—, with a marriage repented in a hangover and new murderous relations.

The sublime ending fades out as it were on a case of mistaken identity at a seaside amusement park.

 

Sailors, Beware!

The theme of involuntary servitude runs through several Laurel & Hardy films (The Live Ghost, Swiss Miss), here Stan’s taxicab is picked up on the wharf and loaded onto the S.S. Mirimar for a millionaire Monte Carlo cruise, he is made a steward (Ollie is the purser).

Anita Garvin and her midget husband Harry Earles (disguised as a baby) aim to roll the passengers, Stan finds them out.

 

The Second Hundred Years

It is incurred for a prison break as painters who, followed by a cop, smear and daub everything in sight so as to pass for genuine.

They briefly pass for French prison officials on a visit, and that’s the end of them.

 

Do Detectives Think?

They read the paper, and recognize the Tipton Slasher as Judge Foozle’s new butler.

Other than that, shadows in a graveyard frighten them away.

Laurel & Hardy as impeccable caricatures of “the world’s worst detectives”.