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”.