Our Relations (1936)

Very well executed

Let's be realistic.

Best movie ever!

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

For me a comedy is a movie in which i have laughs after laughs after laughs and as i have already written, for one time, my country is better than America : over there, the only comedies i rated 10 are Saving Silverman, Looney Tunes, Pee-Wee, Fletch, Raising Arizona, Vacations, Groundhog Day, Miss Doubtfire, Goonies, Gremlins and Ghosbusters… So that makes just an handful and this memorable duo of Laurel & Hardy rejoices now this club ! At first, i feared it would be an old boring and dusty stuff like Charlot but the dynamic duo convinces me of their true genius for the genre in less than 5 minutes : they find crazy things in totally ordinary things and that's when the fun is great : those simple, humble characters, their slice of life is all i ask to smile, unlike today when comedy means big money, big dashing stars, big effects but big boredom and poor results! I was really impressed by the humanity and chemistry of this duo, so faraway of today norms (except the late John Candy and John Goodman, where is the big actor now ?) . The story is a bit like the future Anchors aweigh with sailors ashore and it's funny how i keep on watching twin movies actually : JCVD, la Bellucci, Noomi, Géraldine… And as my mother during BTTF2, here sometimes i was even lost by which pair it was ! Anyway, this DVD was inside a bigger box-set and as i had so much fun with this 1st one, i'm really impatient now to discover the other as well !

Laurel and Hardy double the fun here as a pair of twin brothers separated at childhood, and the film does it's best to keep them apart as they manage to confound everyone in their immediate vicinity, including wives Bubbles Laurel (Betty Healey) and Daphne Hardy (Daphne Pollard). I was expecting the 'lost' Bert and Al to show up as a couple of villains since that seemed to be the set up with Ollie's letter from his Mother, but they wound up being as bumbling a duo as Stan and Ollie. Arriving ashore via the SS Periwinkle, part of their gag consists of investing their earnings with James Finlayson, and delivering a pearl ring for their Captain (Sidney Toler). As the pace of the picture quickens, it's easy enough to get the brother pairs mixed up if you're not paying attention, but the sound track helps out a bit, using the familiar Laurel and Hardy theme music when Stan and Ollie appear on screen, while a typical pirate tune heralds the seafaring duo. When I was watching these Laurel and Hardy flicks as a kid back in the Fifties, the pictures weren't quite twenty years old; now, they're not quite eighty years old! Still, it's easy enough to recall the better ones when you catch a scene like the cement tub gag at the end of the story, with the boys rocking back and forth in that impossible balancing act. All in all, a fun romp with one of the classic comedy duos from the early days.

Our Relations (1936) *** (out of 4) All hell breaks loose in a case of mistaken identity when Laurel and Hardy's twins show up. This isn't nearly their best film but there are plenty of laughs throughout the short running time. The segments inside the bar are the highlights but I think the film would have been even better had L&H played the twins differently.Oliver the Eighth (1934) *** (out of 4) Laurel and Hardy short has Hardy answering an ad in the paper by a woman looking for a husband. What he doesn't know is that she's a psychotic who will murder anyone named Oliver. Again, not too many laughs here but the thing remains entertaining anyways. The gag with the hand under the covers is certainly the highlight.

Is this the most violent Laurel and Hardy film ever made? Surprisingly, while Stan and Ollie's twin brothers – Bert and Alf – are described as "bad lads", it's the originals that are the most malicious, in this sadistic – yet very funny all the same – Laurel and Hardy showcase. Stan gets to headbutt a barman and set fire to another man's chest hair, while Ollie, for his part, sticks a lightbulb in a man's mouth (James Finlayson, a regular stooge for the boys in 35 movies) then punches him in the face so he swallows the broken glass. Their supposedly rogue twins, meanwhile, merely try to save money and treat some ladies to a meal. In order to distinguish between the twins (other than the level of violence they display), musical cues are used – a sea shanty for the sailors Bert and Alf, and the Laurel and Hardy theme for Stan and Ollie.There are lots of great sustained jokes in this movie, such as Ollie's broken spectacles, and the ultimate in a sustained gag is the mistaken identities between the sets of twins. This joke is taken so far towards its logical conclusion that the duos don't discover each other's existence until the final ninety seconds of film. This causes the plot to be far more imaginative, whereas a lesser film would have had greater reliance on the two pairs meeting. Arthur Housman is also good as the drunk, a role he seemed to make a career out of playing in many of his 159 film roles. It was a also a role he reprised with Laurel and Hardy, having played both "drunk" and "drunk sailor" in Scram!, The Live Ghost and The Fixer Uppers.The direction by Harry Lachman is well above average for the pair. Some scenes are shot through a fish tank or the back of a bed's headrail, and there are lots of aerial shots. The split screen technology, while used sparingly, was extremely proficient for the time. One thing of note is that a couple of the sequences, such as the crushed in the telephone box scene, are slightly similar to sight gags in the Marx Brothers film of the previous year, A Night At The Opera. It's not that obvious, and may just be coincidence, but I'd rather hoped that Laurel and Hardy had inspired the Marx Brothers, and not the other way around. But it's probably funnier here anyway, particularly poor old Stan with a boot on his neck. Finally, one of the concluding scenes – Stan crying hysterically as he rolls around on concrete boots – is a real winner.