Bertrand Mandico | Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018

a lost planet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Mandico (screenwriter and director) Ultra pulpe (Apocalypse After) / 2018 [37 minutes]

 

French director Bertrand Mandico has created in Apocalypse After a hot-sex art house film that is beautiful to look at but is frankly rather empty in its narrative about a film shoot in which the actress and director, Apocalypse and Joy D’Amato (Pauline Jacquard and Elina Löwensohn) end both their lesbian affair and their cinematic relationship in a series of surreal-like images.

    Pushing both the bond between the two and the actor to give her more of the “subliminal perversions” of film she is seeking, Joy makes films that are essentially filled with allusions from everyone to artist Henry Darger to filmmakers such as Jean Cocteau and Walerian Borowczyk. The images she captures—through Mandico’s camera—are, in fact, quite stunning, but the pop science fiction tale behind it is pure hokum and distracting.

      Critic Brandon Ledet nicely summarizes it: “The Apocalypse After short is a thematically cohesive but logically incoherent collection of all the stylistic flourishes & quirks sketched out in Mandico’s first two features: the plant life molestations of The Wild Boys, the hollow geode-face zombies of After Blue, and the practically achieved glamour that merges their aesthetics—gel lights, rear projections, body glitter, smoke, prosthetic nipples, etc.”

    He continues  “… In a way, the film shoot setting positions “Apocalypse After” as Mandico’s Knife+Heart (a movie he acted in as a porno cinematographer), but it’s even less of a coherent, linear story and even more of an expression of its director’s fascinations & frustrations with his artform.  Dialogue that declares details of the film shoot “magnificently hideous” or complain, “It’s beautiful, but at the same time I don’t know what he means,” function as meta commentary on the achievements & shortcomings of Mandico’s art.  No dialogue feels more essential to the piece than an actor’s monologue recalling watching forbidden, adult films as a child – compelled & mesmerized by the images on the screen but too young to fully comprehend them. Mandico has a way of turning pornographic indulgence into transcendent visual art, and even then he directs his avatar in Löwensohn to shout that the images are still not erotic enough.  Nothing ever could be.”

 

     Although Mandico’s film also calls up elements of Guy Maddin, Kenneth Anger, and James Bidgood, I’ll take their films any day over the layers of imitation that constitute Mandico’s cinematic world. Perhaps the true missing element here is his utter lack of humor. It’s one thing to imitate those figures I’ve mentioned along with Yann Gonzalez and even Peter Strickland, but it’s quite another to carry the viewer into the work’s narrative. Camp, which at times this film veers towards, is more about the audience than the auteur’s vision.

      I feel chocked, put off, restricted in watching Apocalypse After as if it were an LGBTQ science-fantasy that never once attempted to reach out to me. If Mandico has only paid a little less attention to his own cinematic self-satisfied images and just focused a little more on the viewer, I might have been able to share in his mad fantasies.

 

Los Angeles, November 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).  

Richard Thorpe | The First Night / 1927

the spurned lover

by Douglas Messerli

 

Esther Shulkin (screenplay, based on a story by Frederica Sago Maas), Richard Thorpe (director) The First Night / 1927 [Difficult to obtain]

 

Although this film appears to still be available on Turner Classic Movies, it is rarely shown, and I have not yet found an opportunity to see it. But a rather succinct plot description is available, which I’ll recount.

      Upon the engagement announcement of Doris Frazer (Dorothy Devore) to Dr. Richard Bard (Bert Lytell), Doris receives a letter from the man to whom she was formerly engaged, Jack White (Frederick Ko Vert), threatening to prevent her marriage.

      Meanwhile, Mimi, in a role the script describes as “an adventuress,” by which we might assume she hopes to obtain money, claims that she has proof that Dr. Bard married her in France.

      Faced with these absurd threats, the couple decide to simply elope, and are married.

     But at the moment of their return home, on their first night together one of the doctor’s patients, Mrs. Cleveland (Lila Leslie), feigns illness. And Mimi arrives to claim the doctor as her husband.

     Eventually, they discover that Mimi is actually Jack White in drag, whereupon Doris and Dick admit their former affairs to one another and swear mutual devotion, putting to rest their curious pasts. What the synopsis does not reveal is whether or not the doctor had truly fallen in love with Dick in female costume long ago, or what transpired between them.

     Of course, anyone who has seen one of Frederick Ko Vert’s previous films might have easily guessed that Mimi was also Jack, despite Ko Vert’s remarkable ability to portray the female sex.

 

Los Angeles, July 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).

Leo McCarey | Don't Tell Everything / 1927

my son the maid

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach (screenplay), Leo McCarey (director) Don’t Tell Everything / 1927

 

Max Davidson was an early popular silent film comedian who gained fame for playing a Jewish businessman, using many of the stock and stereotypical mannerisms that had long become famous in theater, but adding new depth to his depictions of a man seeking a new life but straddled and sometimes prevented in his search by his troublesome sons (often played by Spec O’Donnell or Jesse De Vorsky) and his beloved various daughters. Louis B. Meyer did not like his characterizations and allegedly put an end to Davidson’s early popularity.

      Yet in the early days Davidson’s work, particularly as produced by Hal Roach, was highly regarded. One of the best of his short comedies, Don’t Tell Everything (1927), was directed by Leo McCarey who later became the director of numerous acclaimed films including Duck Soup, Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Going My Way, The Bells of St. Mary, and An Affair to Remember.

      His 1927 22-minute work might be said to be divided into two parts, almost defined by its two reels. In the first Papa Ginsberg (Davidson) is on his way to a party at the Doodlebaums with his bratty son Asher (Spec O’Donnell) when he begins to have car problems. Stopping by an auto repair shop, he encounters the incompetent mechanic Finkelheimer (Jesse De Vorska) who slinks up the car to fix what Ginsberg claims is “some little inexpensive thing,” and begins by taking it completely apart.

      Rather inexplicably Ginsberg has found a way to the party which up to this time has featured a comedic dance between a young boy and his overweight girlfriend and the corny magic tricks of Lawyer Goldblum (James Finlayson) which Asher keeps foiling by breaking the liquor glasses and balloons his magic trick requires with a sling-shot.

      His father, meanwhile, is attempting to woo the wealthy widow Finkelheimer (Lillian Elliott), which appears to be going nicely except for the interventions of Asher, a boy who the widow finds detestable, demanding to know from her would-be lover, who he is. Ginsberg insists “In all my life I never saw him before.”

      To escape Asher’s attempt to thwart his romancing, he suggests that the widow and he take a little automotive trip. In front of the Doodlebaum house the car sits, looking quite spiffy despite the fact that we have observed the incompetent mechanic toss away dozens of parts for which he could find no place when piecing the machine back to together again.

     As Ginsberg begins to wind up the starter, the car gradually falls apart beginning with headlights, and ending with every single piece of the machine collapsing upon the concrete. When a street cleaner comes back, the car pieces are suddenly swept away in flood of water that send the car parts into the sewer, Ginsberg managing to save only the license plate.

     As if to compound incompetence with theft, the mechanic visits Ginsberg’s clothing shop a few days later to select a new suit. He picks one out, hinting that his purchase will now square all his debts for the destruction of Ginsberg’s car, to which the shop owner reacts in such an outrage that the mechanic rushes from the store without paying, almost being hit by a passing car. Now, suggests Ginsberg, things are “squared.”

     If the first reel wasn’t all that funny, the second is better if not brilliant, and is why the piece appears in this volume.

     Somehow, despite Asher’s attempts to thwart his father’s relationship with Widow Finkelheimer, the two have hit it off and are now married, Ginsberg having tossed his teenage son out of the house to protect his relationship. In order to return home, as Asher writes his father, he intends to return home dressed as a woman who intends to become the family maid.

       Dressed up in drag, the awkward freckle-faced kid actually looks quite convincing. With his peroxide blonde wig and a rather stylish coat the new girl in town even catches the eye of the widow on a shopping trip, who seems a bit scandalized by the arrival in their neighborhood of such an obvious hussy and follows her into her own home where, listening through the partially open door she hears Asher telling his father “Your wife won’t get wise to us—she’s too dumb.” Finally breaking in on their seeming romantic tête-à-tête, she demands to know what’s going on, while he convinces her he was just meeting with the new maid he has hired to help save his “Mama” from hard work.

      She pretends to be convinced and exits again to finish her shopping, but actually sneaks back in, finding that her husband and the maid have now retired to the bedroom, where, as she sneaks a peek over the transom, she observes Ginsberg, who has angrily begun to try to remove his son’s costume, is observing how smoothly his son has shaved his legs. Storming out, Finkelheimer is on her way this time to the lawyer.

      Finally feeling guilt for having ruined his father’s relationship, Asher attempts to chase after her to explain the situation, forgetting however, that he is now dressed only in his feminine underclothing. A stunned crowd of gawkers quickly gathers, and a cop (Budd Fine) appears out of nowhere, with Asher suddenly declaring to the policeman “Honest, Mister, I’m not a girl—I’m a boy!” as if that might better his absurd situation. But there is something truly close to camp in his statement, and for me it stands out as one of the better crossing-dressing scenes of silent filmmaking.

     The girl/boy runs off, jumping into a barrel of black paint to escape the pursuing cop. Rising from the barrel soon after, the film seems for a moment to be toying with racist humor, but quickly gets back on track as the now black Asher rushes back into the Ginsberg apartment when he observes his step-mother heading home this time in the company of her lawyer (Finlayson).

     Goldblum (in one of magic tricks from the first reel) tries to reassure her that Ginsberg could not be guilty of such behavior, that it all must be a misunderstanding. But when upon entering the bathroom he discovers Ginsberg giving a bubble bath to the maid, with his friend’s lame excuse “the maid needed a bath—awful,” things appear to be over for Ginsberg’s marriage.

      Finally confessing the truth to Finkelheimer, and providing the evidence of his half-naked scrawny son, all is reconciled. A knock at the door, however, interrupts their reunion. Sneaking a peak at who’s behind the door, the former widow sheepishly turns back to Ginsberg to admit that she too has not told her new husband “everything,” that “I also got a son.” The door opens to reveal the incompetent mechanic who destroyed Ginsberg’s auto.

      Today, with their new “blended” family, this work would probably be made into a successful television series; what if Asher rather enjoyed his role as the pretty maid and the mechanic Finkelheimer took a liking to “her?” It might almost be an early Schitt’s Creek, the Canadian TV series from 2015-2020.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (June 2021).

Fred Guiol | Why Girls Like Sailors / 1927

nobody’s perfect

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hal Roach (screenplay), W. H. Walker (titles), Fred Guiol (director) Why Girls Like Sailors / 1927

 

Actually, neither of the two “girls” in this forgettable short directed by Fred Guiol for the Hal Roach Studios—and staring, before they had fully become a team, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy—ended up liking sailors. We have to presume that this work’s title, Why Girls Like Sailors, was ironic.

     Hardy, sporting a scruffy beard and described by an intertitle as "a bully, the nastiest crew member, after the captain of course," is almost a lookalike to that captain (Malcolm Waite), who is just a little taller and stouter, but also features a scruffy beard. Although this basically forgettable comic short of 1927 is generally only sited in lists of LBGTQ movies for the reason that Laurel plays a crossdressing woman (the second of the “girls” I mentioned), the mean men, who endlessly argue like a ship-marooned husband and wife, are a kind of same-sex couple. The “nastier than his nasty underling” captain of “The Merry Maiden” (a name. moreover, that reminds us of the silly sailors in W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore) even allows his first mate to occasionally use his razor and chastises him early in the film for using it too often, in short suggesting that his First Mate has become what one might describe as “too familiar.”

     If nothing much else is made of their relationship, the very fact that they look so much alike characterizes them as a highly temperamental “pair” from whom the other sailors on board try keep their distance. 

     Of course, that doesn’t mean that they are not both seeking out someone of the opposite sex. Even in the pre-code days of filmmaking, sailors, although known to bunk down with one another aboard ship, were generally stereotyped as womanizers once they had reached land. At one point the Captain, planting a kiss upon Willie’s face, even says “I haven’t kissed a woman since we left Africa,” probably an inside racist joke in 1927.

     But this film immediately has other gay fodder on its mind.  Inexplicably aboard a nearby boat in Sugar Bay, where the “Maiden” is now docked, are a seemingly heterosexual couple, Willie Brisling (Laurel) and his fiancée Nellie (Viola Richard).

     Surely this may present us with an image a loving couple—Willie has even just bought his Nellie a lovely necklace—but his gentle kiss of her cheek sends him immediately into a kind stupor that leaves him spinning through their cabin, knocking over a chair and falling into a bed where, with his eyes blinking into empty space and his tongue tied as tight as a noose that is so goofy that even a commentator on the “Laurel and Hardy Central” site describes him as being in “Pixie mode,” as he flits around and makes funny faces, my dictionary describing the word “pixie” as meaning a fairy or, as a second definition, a “petite vivacious woman or girl.”

     The intertitle suggests that “In little Nellie’s eyes, Willie Brisling was the most handsome man in the world. Others saw him in a slightly different light.”

     Prowling their boat is also the Captain of the “Maiden,” who once he spots Nellie is determined to kidnap her and take her back to his own quarters. Entering the loving couple’s room, he instantly begins to court Willie’s girl, who pulling away, introduces the stranger to her lover, who she declares has his own boat; “Show him Willie.”

      Willie pulls open his shirt to reveal a tattoo of his ship, “the Periwinkle.” A periwinkle, in case you’ve forgotten, is a blue flower, often described as the flower of death, supposedly because its glossy vines were often woven into headbands placed upon criminals on their way to execution and children who had recently died. We can only suspect that the filmmaker or his writers, at least, are telling us that any trip with Willie—even to the altar—can end only in a kind of frozen netherworld.

      The Captain quickly douses Willie’s dreams of any voyage by pouring an entire jug of water down his blouse, the liquid ballooning about his belly as if he suddenly had become pregnant.

      In fact, soon after the Captain does abscond with Nellie, Willie’s previously empty head—I should add that just before this he has attempted to scare away another would-be girlfriend poacher by portraying a “headless man”—conceives of a solution to his situation: he will dress as a woman, seducing the four sailors and then the captain himself.

       How he achieves this consists of a rather boring repetition of luring each sailor, one by one, around a corner where in conks them with a cudgel which sends them, in turn, spinning around the next corner to where the First Mate is standing watch. When they, in turn, collide with their superior he angrily tosses them into the ocean. When their own motions no longer take them around that corner, the “new girl” literally dances them toward the First Mate, sometimes posing them into positions of tentative attack. One by one the sailors are disposed of. And now Willie, reborn as a wild, flirting sex fiend, can turn her/his attentions to the Captain by sitting on his lap, recklessly tweaking his check, and even placing her arm around his shoulder.

     Enter the Captain’s wife, longing for more than a month of martial bickering, and just in time to observe his new sexual shenanigans. She’s ready to shoot him as well as the other woman, but Willie as the easy woman, tells her it’s all just been a test to make her jealous.

     Escaping, at least momentarily, the wife’s wrath, Willie hops off to save his Nellie, the two of them, now like girlfriends walking off into the future—but not before the wife, spotting them through the porthole, shoots the clothes off their back, leaving the two to walk away in their under garments both with an utter hatred of sailors and their landlubber wives.

     Rereading what I just wrote I realize I’ve made this double reeler sound much funnier than this movie truly is. The short was thought to have been lost until in 1971 the Cinémathèque Française announced they had a copy, but critic Roland Lacourbe, after reviewing it, found it simply “mediocre.”

     A private Danish collector later was also found to own a 16mm print, and helped it to be re-released in Copenhagen. After Laurel and Hardy author Glenn Mitchell saw that version he observed "Why Girls Love Sailors is one of several instances where the status of a 'lost' film has been reduced by its rediscovery."

 

Los Angeles, August 13, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2020).

Ben Benjamin | Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019

where o where is love?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lucas Tamaren (music with Thumpasurus), Ben Benjamin (director) Where Does the Love Go: An Opera in Five Parts / 2019 [17 minutes]

 

If you might have thought Lucas Tamaren’s strutting wide-open butt of the 2021 video Sruttin’ was sexually transgressive—which it most certainly was, as well as highly entertaining—but you also might want to go back a few years in time to visit their full 17-minute “opera” tribute to closeted gay actor John Travolta. This is not just a tribute to Travolta by a fan musical group, but a full statement of his career, as it moves in part 1 from its longingly sung lament about the lost love of his earliest years as an actor, re-enacted in the first part of this “opera,” wherein they sing almost endlessly of “Where does it go, where does the good love flow?” as the video presents numerous scenes from Travolta’s early works.

     The film reminds me of the rumors of how homosexual writer Gore Vidal moved just to be near to him. Whether true of not, Travolta was long rumored to be bisexual, with a great deal of evidence, despite his and other highly protective friends’ fierce denials.

     In this opera by Thumpasaurus it doesn’t truly matter. The operatic performance is in love with him, decrying the fact that the deep love has gone, and relating its history.

      The second act, “Without Your Love,” details the part of his career where Travolta’s love interests had turned entirely into the heterosexual world of Two of a Kind (1983), Staying Alive 1983), and other files of the decade in which he seemed to have lost his role as a slightly gay icon

in Saturday Night Live, Urban Cowboy, and The Boy in the Plastic Bubble of the 1970s. The dominant song here is “I’m in Love with Her, Where Did It Go, I Cannot Know.” We are presented with shots from his major films of that period

      It gets worse in Act III, “Hell…and the Abyss,” where we enter the nadar of Travolta’s 1990 films such as Look Who's Talking Too (1990), Look Who’s Talking Now (1994), and from the gay perspective even his successful films such as Pulp Fiction (1994) and Get Shorty (1995) and Battlefield Earth (2000). He now had become a clearly heteronormative figure, and the lover, at least from the Thumpasaurus perspective is seemingly forever lost as a Bosch-like figures. He had become so closeted as a member of the Church of Scientology that he now appeared truly in a hell where no gay person might love him, even when in 2012 when two former masseurs accused him of homosexual demands.

     There is only a kind of echo music in this section of the work, with the heavy thump of Henry Was’ drums. The visuals, however, from Ben Benjamin’s direction, are truly quite spectacular.

     The dog/duck sneaks back in for the Fourth Act, titled “I Will Get the Love Back,” in which Travolta returns to film as truly loveable figure through the film’s graphics, playing a French horn on the Ellen DeGeneres Show before he transforms in the last Act, titled “Love” as the heavyset worried Baltimore mamma of the musical version of John Waters’ absurdist musical, Hairspray, playing Edna Turnblad, the woman all transvestites wanted to be as overweight men.

       This love story to Travolta might be the sincerest, although quite campy and silly at moments, tribute to any Hollywood figure; I hope John, if he still can, jizzed into his tight bluejeans of decades before upon viewing it.

        The graphics in Benjamin’s film say everything except for the endless questioning chorus of lyrics: “Where does it go where does the good love go.” Evidently into just such a video.

       I’m still surprised that there is so little out there about Lucas Tamaren and Thumpasurus; Wikipedia does even provide a full entry.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).

Fred Guiol | Duck Soup / 1927 || James Parrott | Another Fine Mess / 1930

renting out agnes

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screen titles based on the 1908 play Home from the Honeymoon by Arthur J. Jefferson) Fred Guiol (director) Duck Soup / 1927

H.M. Walker (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur J. Jefferson), James Parrott (director) Another Fine Mess / 1930

 

Fred Guiol’s 1927 silent film Duck Soup with actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy was long thought to be lost, and for years, until it was rediscovered in 1974, critics thought that it consisted primarily of skits by Laurel with Hardy playing only a small part. What they discovered was that, in fact, it is one of the first real pairings of the duo similar to what a year later they would be performing for the rest of their careers together.

     In this film the pairing represents a much rougher view of the two, presenting them as determined thieves instead of the confused but basically well-meaning down-and-outers which they often later play, but as the Movies Silently blog writer argues, that already in “the quieter moments with Stan and Ollie just interacting demonstrate that something magical is happening.”

      Even the film’s details in comparison with its 1930 talking-film remake Another Fine Mess show how the script by Arthur J. Jefferson, Laurel’s father in which Stan performed on stage as a child, was later finessed to shape them as more likeable fellows. In this early version they are hobos, Hardy in particular unshaved, sitting in the park where the fire rangers are rounding up their kind to help the fire department put out a fire which evidently another hobo started. Such enforced labor was common in the early part of the 20th century, and is still used today with prison inmates called to some unruly blazes.

       The pair, observing the others being rounded up by the cops, escape via bicycle through heavy traffic to wind up in a mansion where their bike breaks down and whose open door invites them to enter. We have just witnessed the manor’s owner, Marmaduke Maltravers (James A. Marcus) abusing his butler (William Courtright) and his maid as he plans to leave on vacation. The boys overhear the servants, who have been asked to rent out the mansion in their master’s absence, the servants planning their own escape for the weekend.

      Since the rangers have by now surrounded the house, Stan and Ollie have no choice but to stay where they are, immediately taking advantage of the kitchen larder, a meal interrupted by the sound of doorbell, at the other end of which stands Lord Tarbotham (William Austin) and Lady Tarbotham (Madeline Hurlock). Quickly costuming themselves as Hardy’s recreation of Maltraver’s character, Colonel Blood and the maid Agnes (Stan), they greet the would-be renters and attempt to show them around the place, the Colonel taking the Lord in search of a game room and pool, while Agnes chats with Lady Tarbotham, is asked questions about fleas and mice, and ultimately asked to draw her a bath, in which Stan as Agnes nearly drowns.

        The jokes here are for broader and the action more frenetic than in their later works, particularly when the real owner Maltravers returns unexpectedly to retrieve something he has left behind observing that Stan and Ollie have hired a moving truck and are already busy packing up trunks of his possessions. Pulling out a gun, Maltravers shoots at everyone, our boys and the would-be renters, as he chases the gang of interlopers around the house before the forest rangers enter and cart the two off.

     Director Fred Guiol obviously didn’t quite perceive the “magic” he had created by putting the two together as a team in Duck Soup which was released in March 13, 1927.  For later that year in a July release, he had again cast them in unrelated roles in his Why Girls Like Sailors (which I discuss below) in which Hardy, totally bearded this time, plays a mean captain keen on stealing away Laurel’s girlfriend, forcing Stan, in yet another cross-dressing role, to play a woman who seduces most of the male crew away from their duties of guarding his kidnapped girlfriend.

      By 1930 in Another Fine Mess, however, they had truly become the Laurel and Hardy we know today, and producer Hal Roach was determined to remake the earlier film into a vessel more in line with their new characterizations, piloted by director James Parrott.

      This time the boys also are living in the park, making their home on a pair of benches where they also curl up for the night. But it is the police who come after them, one policeman at least, terribly offended when after telling them to leave their temporary reside, Stan has tipped his hat and called him “Ma’am.” In this case the clearly homophobic cop is truly mad, and calls up all his buddies to track down the two, who again in their attempt to escape, enter a Hancock Park mansion, just after the owner, Colonel Wilberforce Bucksot (James Finlayson) leaves for his vacation, leaving the estate’s rental in the hands of his servants, the butler Meadows (Eddie Dunn) and his maid Agnes (Gertrude Sutton) who when the master’s away determine to play on the beaches of another vacation spot.

      That once more leaves the costumed Ollie to play Colonel Buckshot and the always put-upon Stan to again don the maid’s costume to become Agnes. The British renter in this case, Lord Leopold Ambrose Plumtree (Charles K. Gerrard) who plays a toothsome constantly giggling upper class Britisher type that might make Reginald Gardiner’s—channeling Noel Coward in his The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)—imitation of Lord Cedric Bottomly envious. 

      Plumtree insists upon Buckshot showing him the billiard room, while Lady Plumtree (Thelma Todd) sits down for a strangely touching chat with the by now almost “whacky” Agnes, who keeps insisting when she utters ridiculous sentences that she’s simply nervous. Nonetheless, the Lady is so taken with Agnes that she insists that the maid come with the rental of the mansion.

      Instead of attempting to steal the mansion treasures, Hardy as Buckshot rents out the place for a few dollars a month, throwing in the maid for a few more quarters. But as before all is thwarted with the return of the real Colonel who has forgotten his bow and arrow, who finding so many strangers in the house, summons the police and also takes out a gun.

     In this instance, our daffy duo attempt their escape once more on a bicycle followed by a whole squadron of cops who chase them into a railroad tunnel, Stan and Ollie exciting on unicycles, obviously having their vehicle severed by the train met head on.

    This film wasn’t the last time Hardy would attempt to rent out Stan as Agnes, the maid; in the 1940 (filmed in 1939) release A Chump at Oxford, Agnes gets totally drunk, spills a whole tray of hors d’oeuvres upon her employer’s dress, and strips down to her panties in order to “undress the salad.”

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).