Men O' War
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| Men O' War | |
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 Theatrical poster for Men O' War (1929) |
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| Directed by | Lewis R. Foster |
| Produced by | Hal Roach |
| Written by | Leo McCarey H.M. Walker |
| Starring | Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy Jimmy Finlayson Anne Cornwall Harry Bernard Baldwin Cooke Gloria Greer Charlie Hall |
| Cinematography | Jack Roach George Stevens |
| Editing by | Richard C. Currier |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) | June 29, 1929 |
| Running time | 19:18 |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Men O' War is a 1929 short comedy film starring Laurel and Hardy.
Contents |
[edit] Story
The film opens with a montage of scenes in a park; canoers on a lake, a band playing in a bandstand, before showing us a washerwoman walking along one of the paths in the park with a basket of laundry on her shoulder. A ladies' undergarment falls from the basket onto a shrub. Two young girls (Anne Cornwall and Gloria Greer) stop near the shrub where they chitchat about a man they'd encountered the previous evening. Stan and Ollie, playing sailors on leave, happen by and exchange flirtatious glances with the girls. The girls giggle and hurry away, and after they leave the scene Stan and Ollie find the undergarment. "They faw down!" Ollie exclaims. A bicyclist passing by chides the two men for displaying the undergarment: "Naughty, naughty!" he chants, so distracted that he fails to notice he's pedaling off the path until he takes a header into the lake.
Nearby, Anne now discovers she's lost her gloves. They return to where Stan and Ollie are standing. Ollie asks if they have lost anything. Anne describes her loss as "white, very odd--they button on the side." "I'll bet you miss them," Ollie remarks. "well, you can just about imagine how I feel without them," Anne replies. "Good thing it's warm weather, isn't it?" Ollie says, exploding into laughter. "And I just cleaned them with gasoline too," Anne adds, prompting a disbelieving double-take from the boys. Ollie guesses the time has come to return the undergarment, which he hands to Stan, prompting Stan to hand it to Anne; at the same time, a policeman, having found the gloves, appears and asks "Did either of you ladies lose anything?" "Yes, I lost a pair of gloves!" Anne exclaims, which solves that mystery. The gloves are returned. Ollie now invites the girls to join him and Stan for something to drink. "I just love soldiers!" Anne cries, prompting Ollie to do a delayed, sad reaction and hand her off to Stan with "Meet the general." "Oh, General!" Anne says, taking Stan's arm. Stan hastily consigns the undergarment to a bush as the two couples stroll off to the soda fountain.
At the soda fountain, Stan indicates to Ollie he has only fifteen cents. "I lost the rest." Ollie tells Stan that each of them will order a soda; when it comes to Stan's turn, Stan will refuse. Ollie grandly announces to the soda clerk (James Finlayson): "Soda" (indicating Anne), "Soda" (indicating Gloria), "Soda" (indicating himself), before coming to "And my dear Stan, what will you have?" "Soda," Stan says, indicating himself. Ollie hastily pulls Stan outside and repeats his instructions. "Can't you grasp the situation? You must refuse." Back inside Ollie repeats the "soda" requests and again Stan interjects his own "soda", resulting in Ollie stamping on Stan's foot, Stan poking Ollie in the eye, and Ollie apologizing to the girls: "Just playing together." Back outside they go once more for a third attempt, and this time, when Stan's turn comes in the ordering process, Stan says humbly, "I don't want any." "Oh, General, don't be a piker!" Anne urges. "All right, I'll have a banana split," Stan says. After more whispered conversation, Ollie agrees "we can split ours" and the orders are taken by Finlayson. Finlayson sets a soda before Stan and Ollie, and Ollie tells Stan, "Go ahead and drink your half." Stan drinks the glass dry. Ollie examines the empty glass sadly. "Do you know what you've done?" he asks. Stan nods. "What made you do it?" "I couldn't help it," Stan apologizes tearfully. "My half was on the bottom." He weeps on Ollie's shoulder as Ollie receives the check. The total comes to thirty cents, not fifteen, and Ollie does a double take at the figure. He turns to the still-weeping Stan. "That's all right," he tells Stan. "You're not mad at me?" Stan asks. "Not a bit!" Ollie says, and tells Stan "it's your party and I'll let you pay the check." He hands the check to Stan and escorts the girls outside. Stan is about to hand the fifteen cents to Finlayson when he sees the check totals thirty cents. Despite Ollie's threatening gesture not to put the money into a slot machine, Stan does so, pulls the handle, and the machine clicks off slowly before pouring out a quantity of nickels.
The scene fades into a dock lakeside at the park. Ollie, having rented a boat from Finlayson and purchased some souvenirs for the girls, glares at Stan, who is ensconced in the stern of the rowboat with Anne and Gloria on either side. Stan and Ollie then attempt to row the boat out into the lake but succeed only in going in circles. They try rowing on opposite sides and make another circle. They try rowing while facing each other and make another circle while tangling each other's arms. Ollie slaps Stan's hands away and Stan hits Ollie with his sailor's hat, much to Anne's delight. The boys try to exchange seats with each other, and while trying to do so, the rowboat, which has drifted out into the lake, collides with a canoe rowed by Charlie Hall. "Wy don't you look where you're going, ya big dumbbells!" Hall shouts. "Bumping into my boat!" The girls are shocked by Hall's accusations, and Stan throws a hatfull of water into Hall's face. Ollie laughs, and Hall takes Ollie's hat and sloshes a hatfull of water into Ollie's face. Ollie breaks Hall's canoe paddle in half, and Stan shoves Hall into the lake. Finlayson, standing on the dock, begins to witness these events, reacting furiously. Hall now climbs into Stan and Ollie's rowboat and hits Ollie with a cushion. Ollie takes another cushion and hurls it at Hall, but the cushion flies over Hall's head and knocks another canoer (Baldwin Cooke) out of his craft. Cooke now climbs into Stan and Ollie's rowboat and demands "Who threw that cushion?" "He did!" Stan shouts, pointing to Hall. "No I did not!" Hall remonstrates. "Well somebody did!" Cooke exclaims, and begins to beat Hall with the cushion. Hall and Cooke now engage in a cushion fight, much to Stan's, Ollie's, and the girls' amusement. Meanwhile Cooke's capsized canoe is run into by another canoe, which also capsizes, throwing the couple aboard into the water; a third then runs into the second, plunging its occupants into the lake. All concerned swim to Stan and Ollie's boat, where they argue and engage in fisticuffs involving pillows and cushions. Finlayson, seeing his boat rental business rapidly being scuttled, summons the policeman seen earlier, but when both try to board another rowboat, they fall overboard. The policeman swims out to Stan and Ollie's boat and boards, followed closely by Finlayson. Finlayson, in attempting to pull himself onto the stern of the now seriously overloaded rowboat, pulls the transom below water. As the boat fills and sinks, the occupants continue to argue and fight until the boat founders.
[edit] Production Information
Men O'War, Laurel and Hardy's third sound film, was written in early May, 1929, and filmed from May 11 to May 18 of that year before being released by M-G-M on June 29. Much of the short was filmed at Hollenbeck Park in Los Angeles, with the exception of the soda fountain scenes, which were shot at the Hal Roach studio. (source: Randy Skretvedt, "Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies").
[edit] Cast
Stan Laurel (Stan)
Oliver Hardy (Ollie)
Anne Cornwall (Stan's girl friend)
Gloria Greer (Ollie's girl friend)
James Finlayson (Soda clerk)
Charlie Hall (Canoer)
Baldwin Cooke (Canoer)
Pete Gordon (Bicycle rider)
Harry Bernard (Policeman)
[edit] Commentary
Like many of Laurel and Hardy's early sound shorts, Men O'War has a tripartite construction, a structure the team would simplify in later shorts, reducing the individual sequences to two, and sometimes to a single lengthy gag sequence framed only by brief introductory and wrap-up scenes to establish context. This fairly strict three-part sequencing results in a form that is somewhat stiff as judged by comparison with the team's later work. But of note, the first two parts are largely dependent on dialogue: the first involving a lengthy exchange of double-entendres (no doubt influenced by stage farces of the era), the second involving a reworking of an old vaudeville standard called "A Glass of Beer", first performed onstage by the team of Weber and Fields some twenty-five years previous to the date of this film, and used previously by Laurel and Hardy as the middle sequence of their 1928 short Should Married Men Go Home? Both of these sequences demonstrate how Laurel and Hardy were, even at this early stage of working within the sound medium, eager to expand the comic possibilities afforded by dialogue, and the earlier sequence is often cited by Laurel and Hardy enthusiasts as one of the team's outstanding dialogue performances.
Like many of Laurel and Hardy's silent shorts, Men O'War concludes with a scene of mounting "reciprocal destruction", in which Laurel and Hardy's momentary antagonism sparks a much larger scene of disaster embroiling passersby or innocent bystanders. Unlike the preceding two sequences, the humor here is largely derived from sight gags and the rapidly-increasing chain reaction of capsizing boats. The difficulties of filming on-location in this era are noticeable here: for example, when Charlie Hall sloshes Ollie with water, one can hear a boy laughing off camera, and the sound quality itself suffers from echoing and background noise. Still, for its time, this is a very technically accomplished sound film, in which the primitive aspects of the recording are for the most part minimized. One of the most unusual uses of sound, and a clear indication of how Laurel and Hardy could inject new and subtle uses of sound in a visual medium, is the largely silent scene where Stan defiantly puts a nickel into the slot machine over Ollie's silent, but obvious, objection. The sound track records the clicks of the machine as Stan looks dubiously but hopefully into the camera, then switches to a shot of Finlayson reacting triumphantly as the first, then the second, tumblers fall into place, before the third disgorges a rush of nickels (which we hear but do not see). This remarkably subtle use of sound to complement the scene, allowing the camera to focus not on the expected "plot" elements of winning the money and resolving the dilemma of the unpaid check, but on the facial reactions and body language of the actors within the scene, is a fair gauge of the uses the team would make of sound in subsequent films, and how comedic reaction, largely visual, would remain in primacy of place over the plot or narrative demands conditioned by dialogue in the sound comedies of most every other comedian of this era.
This was James Finlayson's first sound film, and the one in which his trademark exclamation of "D'oh!" (cited by Dan Castellaneta as the progenitor for Homer Simpson's similar expression of disbelief or outrage) can first be heard. Anne Cornwall had been an actress throughout the 1920s in silent films, most prominently as Buster Keaton's girlfriend in the 1927 feature College; this was one of her few appearances in a sound film.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
Template:1920s-comedy-film
