A strange little two-reeler, with Hardy answering an ad in the personals to marry a wealthy widow (Mae Busch). He soon learns that she has married seven other men named Oliver before her, all of whom met with death by having their throats cut, and that he is "Oliver the Eighth". English comedian Jack Barty is quite effective as the loopy butler. He plays cards with an invisible deck, and serves the boys an invisible meal (a surreal and funny sequence that looks forward to their synthetic meal in the later SAPS AT SEA). Hardy, ever the gentleman and not wanting to be rude, goes along with the charade, and of course Laurel actually begins to enjoy the non-existent "food".
Next the boys are off to bed, and rig an elaborate set-up to keep eachother awake in case the widow comes in to cut Ollie's throat during the night. Of course, Ollie is soon distracted from the fear of having his throat cut by Stan's constant interruptions and near-fatal accidents with a shotgun ("Isn't it bad enough that I'm going to have my throat cut without you trying to shoot me first!"). This sequence also contains a great line that sums up Stan's ability to convey an odd logic even through illogical-sounding statements: when Ollie finds Stan sleeping instead of watching the door, Stan tells him, "I was dreaming that I was awake, and then I woke up and found myself asleep".
Released in England as THE PRIVATE LIFE OF OLIVER THE EIGHTH, its title a joke on Alexander Korda's hit film THE PRIVATE LIFE OF HENRY VIII, released the year before.
GOING BYE-BYE
Well-constructed and solid comedy with Laurel and Hardy as chief witnesses in the trial of gangster Butch Long that puts him behind bars for life. Butch warns the boys that he will break out and get even with them if it's the last thing he does. Deciding to flee town, the pair advertise for a companion on their journey to help share expenses, and the person who answers the ad turns out to be Butch's girlfriend, who is helping her fugitive boyfriend get away. The ending contains another one of those grim sight gags Laurel liked to include every so often: Butch lives up to his promise of tearing the boys' legs off and tying them around their necks! Despite the grotesque final gag and some pretty brutal slapstick (Walter Long is poked with a drill and scorched by a blowtorch), this is one of the team's funnier efforts.
There's a little moment I noticed for the first time on this viewing, when Laurel opens a window, and a breeze blows the curtains open slightly. It's the kind of thing I have missed through many viewings over the years, and has absolutely nothing to the story or gags, but it's a good example of the care and attention to detail that went into making these films.
THEM THAR HILLS
A top-notch, leisurely-paced little short, with Stan and Ollie taking a trip into the mountains while Ollie recovers from a case of gout. With this film, they returned to the kind of escalating "tit-for-tat" sequence that had appeared in many of their best silents, but which they'd never quite figured out how to adapt to sound. Here, they solve that problem, by reducing the scale and focusing on a smaller situation and the reactions by each character after each new attack has been delivered, thereby avoiding the problem of staging large-scale battles that relied on frenetic action and quicker editing between the various participants.
THE LIVE GHOST
Another "fright" comedy, a format that Laurel and Hardy had pretty well exhausted by this point and that was never particularly suited to their style of humor in the first place. Here the boys are shanghaied into sailing on a supposedly haunted ship. Fright comedy requires a certain degree of broadness that was not really compatible with Laurel and Hardy's more subtle, character-driven approach. In order to work, the "scares" must be genuine and effective enough to really be frightening, so that the comedian's reaction then diffuses the horror, and allows the audience to enjoy a nervous laugh out of relief. Abbott and Costello took one approach in their horror comedies, with Costello usually scared speechless, and wildly mugging and gesticulating in panic when confronted by a monster which would be relieved when Abbott re-entered the scene and the monster would disappear. Bob Hope, in films like THE GHOST BREAKERS, took another approach, delivering clever one-liners to diffuse the spooky proceedings.
Laurel and Hardy never needed such situations from which to derive laughs, as this film demonstrates. They created their own chaos to react to. THE LIVE GHOST is not one of their weakest efforts, however, and in fact contains some very funny moments, but the broad, almost cartoonish material could have been played as well by other comedians.
TIT FOR TAT
A sequel to THEM THAR HILLS, with the boys running an electronics store next to Charlie Hall and Mae Busch's supermarket. Continuing their feud from the previous film, the premise runs out of steam a bit before the two reels are over, but there are still plenty of good gags here. The best is a running joke with an affable little shoplifter systematically cleaning out the inventory of the boys' shop. Contains the classic "Laurelism": "He who filters your good name steals trash."
THE FIXER-UPPERS
I've never particularly cared for this one, although I must admit I find it interesting that the premise is so unusual and rather complex, especially considering that it was the second-to-last short that the team made. It's a romantic farce with the boys as greeting card salesmen that come across an unhappily married woman, whose husband - a temperamental artist - has been ignoring her. Ollie agrees to help her out by allowing her husband to think they're having an affair, which will re-ignite the artist's passion for his wife. Instead, it ignites his fierce temper, as he challenges Ollie to a duel to the death. This one feels like a case of compensating for a lack of ideas by creating an unnecessarily complicated plot with an overwritten script, and with its lackluster ending, is one of their most forgettable films.
THICKER THAN WATER
Laurel and Hardy's final starring short is a charming little domestic comedy that contains a rather disjointed and loose plot, but it's funny enough that it hardly matters. There are two sequences in this film that should be mentioned as being among the finest the boys ever did. The first involves Stan, Ollie, Daphne Pollard and James Finlayson trying to track down what happened to the money for a furniture payment. It requires a verbal dexterity and precision of logic that, like the best of the Abbott and Costello routines, is impressive for the comedians' ability to pull it off successfully. The second is the auction sequence that finds Stan and Ollie bidding against each other, which works so well because it's perfectly in character for them. The final gag, in which the boys swap personalities after a botched blood transfusion, is a cute wrap-up to their last starring short comedy.
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