Directed by William A. Seiter
Written by Frank Craven
1933/US
Hal Roach Studios
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Oliver: Do you have to ask your wife everything?
Stan: If I didn’t ask her, I wouldn’t know what she wanted me to do.
Is this the funniest of the Laurel and Hardy features? Quite possibly.
Stan and Ollie are members of a crazy sort of lodge called The Sons of the Desert. The leader of their group makes everyone swear to attend the national convention in Chicago. But Ollie’s wife refuses to let him go in the most vehement way possible. Stan’s wife is more lenient.
So Ollie fakes an illness and gets a doctor (actually a veterinarian) to recommend a sea cruise to Honolulu. His wife is persuaded to let him go without her since she doesn’t like water. The boys, of course, head straight to Chicago. They are in trouble throughout. Most especially when they get home. With Mae Busch as Hardy’s wife and Dorothy Christy as Laurel’s.
I loved the “two peas in a pot/pod/pod-ah” gag, all the broken crockery, and the “Honolulu Baby” number and reprises. A whole lot of fun.
You could not grow up in Denmark in the seventies and eighties without being intimately familiar with Laurel and Hardy or Gøg og Gokke as they were called here. I think my favourite is the one where they join the foreign legion.
I’m very fond of Out West, the one where they do the little dance together. I don’t believe I’ve seen the Foreign Legion one.
In one of the shorts, they join the foreign Legion to forget the girl who jilted them. The photo shows the girl to be Jean Harlow, very early in her career.
I’m too lazy to look up the title to be sure, but I think it was Beau Hunks.
I’ll have to keep an eye out for that one.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021646/
(note runtime 37 minutes)
I’ll try to catch it . The year is right!