| We Faw Down | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Leo McCarey |
| Produced by | Hal Roach |
| Written by | H.M. Walker |
| Starring | Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy Vivien Oakland Bess Flowers Kay Deslys |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) | December 29, 1928 |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Silent film English (Original intertitles) |
We Faw Down is a 1928 two-reel silent comedy starring Laurel and Hardy and directed by Leo McCarey. It was shot in August and September 1928, and released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer on December 29 of that year, with synchronized music and sound effects in theaters wired for sound.
The plot line was later reworked into one of Laurel and Hardy's most celebrated films, Sons of the Desert (1933).
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This story is based upon the assumption that, somewhere in the world, there are husbands who do not tell their wives everything —
It is a typical afternoon for the Laurels and the Hardys: they keep polite company, the girls playing cards while The Boys sulk in the other room. Escape comes in the form of a phone call from a crony inviting the men to a poker game. Oliver speaks loudly and clearly into the phone: "Yes, BOSS..." With orders from the boss, after all, the better halves can hardly object to their leaving. One wrong-hat mixup and — freedom.
Of course, it is not going to last. We see two toughie girls, talking with "One Round" Kelly, the swarthy tough-guy prizefighter boyfriend of Kay, one of the girls. After he leaves, an electric fan blows her hat into the street, under a car — just as the gallant protagonists stroll onto the scene. Under Ollie's elaborate orchestration, they push the car forward just as a street-washing machine comes by and floods the gutter with water. Down they go, and although the tough girl's hat is retrieved, The Boys are sopping wet. She invites them up to her apartment to dry their clothes.
Meanwhile, galloping fire horses and some action footage inform us of the calamitous fire at the Orpheum Theatre — The Boys' alibi as to their boss-obeying whereabouts. The wives snag a newspaper detailing the blaze and set out for town and, they hope, their intact husbands.
Except that the aforementioned husbands are currently sitting in bathrobes and smiles at the girls' table, thoroughly populated by empty beer bottles. Tipsy Kay gets very touchy-feely with Stan, poking different spots on his neck and causing his eyebrow to raise or his tongue to flick out. The physicality increases in scope until Stan gets upset and wants to stop. Kay's feelings are hurt, and just as Ollie tries to console her, "One Round" enters and sees Hardy's conciliatory embrace. He produces a huge knife from under his coat, but before he can use it, Stan stops him in his tracks with a pie in the face. You should always take a pie to a knife fight.
The Boys grab their clothes, and after another wrong-hat mixup, wriggle out a window, only to plop out on the sidewalk right in front of their wives. Unseen by their husbands, the wives turn and beat it, arriving home only moments before the men, who are practicing their Orpheum alibi. Inside, Ollie tries to describe the show they saw based on charades-style clues from Stan, who's reading an ad for it from the newspaper. No soap, though — the women remain unconvinced, and when Ollie realizes the Orpheum burned, he says, "Good thing we went to the Palace." This is too much even for Stan, who breaks out in paroxysms of glee: Even "I could 'a' thought of a better one than that."
When Kay's friend arrives at the front door with Ollie's forgotten vest ("Here's your vest, Big Boy"), it's the last straw for Mrs. Hardy. She produces a shotgun and chases the men out and around the corner into a side courtyard. Her first shot produces a very funny sight gag and the film's final visual punchline: some two dozen men come dropping out of first and second floor windows onto the ground, many of them pants-less.
We Faw Down is the first Laurel and Hardy film with Leo McCarey in the director's chair after more than a year guiding the team's characters' development as "Supervisor." He would go on to direct their best silents, and eventually to win Best Director Oscars for the feature films The Awful Truth (1937) and Going My Way (1944).
A contemporary account says that the basic story was contributed, unusually, by Oliver Hardy, who had heard similar gossip from his laundress.[1]
Critic/historian William K. Everson makes a different contention, tracing the story back to the Mack Sennett comedy Ambrose's First Falsehood.[2]
Interior shooting took place at the Hal Roach studio; exteriors were shot both on the Roach back lot and on several locations in Culver City.
The original Victor sound discs for We Faw Down were thought lost until the 1990s, when a set was discovered. Certain European DVD editions feature this original synchronized score, but American DVDs (Region 1) still have music cannibalized from other L&H Victor soundtracks.
This short is better known for what got cut out of it than for what remained in it. As originally scripted and shot, The Boys flee the girls' apartment having pulled on each other's pants, then dart from spot to spot in town trying to find a private place to rectify the situation. An irate husband, a suspicious cop — even a belligerent king crab — all conspire to thwart the swapping o' the pants.[3] Unfortunately, this reel's worth of very funny material made the film just too long, so the filmmakers reluctantly excised it. They saved it, though, and it became the core of Laurel and Hardy's next short, Liberty (1929).
Ten years later, Stan Laurel would dust off his final shot concept from We Faw Down to close out the L&H feature Block-Heads (1938). Unfortunately, the sight gag which had been such a funny and fitting capstone to the earlier film, a film about perceived infidelity, proves a complete non sequitur the second time around. It is interesting, though, to see how all the vegetation had grown up in the courtyard over ten years' time.
It was sometimes known under a different title (We Slip Up). This separate title was used in the compilation film The Golden Age of Comedy, released in 1957.
With its funniest material — sorting out the pants mix-up — excised and saved for use in Liberty, We Faw Down draws only tepid notices from most critics.
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