| Wrong Again | |
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Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | Leo McCarey |
| Produced by | Hal Roach |
| Written by | Lewis R. Foster (story) Leo McCarey (story) H.M. Walker (titles) |
| Starring | Stan Laurel Oliver Hardy |
| Cinematography | Jack Roach George Stevens |
| Editing by | Richard C. Currier |
| Distributed by | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Release date(s) | February 23, 1929 |
| Running time | 20 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | Silent film English (Original intertitles) |
Wrong Again is a 1929 two-reel comedy silent film starring Laurel and Hardy. It was shot in October and November 1928, and released February 23, 1929, by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Although it is a silent film, it was released with a synchronised music and sound-effects track in theatres equipped for sound.
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At the fashionable Piping Rock Riding Academy —
Stable grooms Laurel and Hardy overhear news of a $5,000 reward for the return of the stolen painting Blue Boy, but think the reward is for the horse at their barn named Blue Boy. When they bring the horse to the painting's owner, he speaks to them from an upstairs window where he can't see the steed; he tells them to bring Blue Boy in the house and put "him" on the piano. This triggers a running gag where Ollie explains patiently to Stan that (Scott Fitzgerald aside), the rich are different from you and me. He punctuates his lesson with a twisting gesture of his hand to demonstrate the 180-degree difference between the classes.
The three come clumping through the front door while the millionaire upstairs takes a bath — "and it ain't even Saturday," a title card informs us. Ollie has an altercation with a nude statue, which snaps into three pieces after the two tumble to the floor; Hardy, ever the gentleman, safeguards the statue's modesty by wrapping its bare torso in his coat while he reassembles it. When the statue's back upright and Ollie removes the coat, the torso segment is backwards, so its backside protrudes out from where its midriff should be. Wrong again!
Meanwhile, the suddenly obstreperous Blue Boy has taken to chasing Stanley around the house, while a cross-cut reveals that the police have recovered the Blue Boy painting and are making plans to return it. Working together, The Boys manage to lead the horse over to the grand piano, and up he leaps to his high perch. Shots of the millionaire upstairs in his tub reveal that he's at least hearing the commotion below.
Things seem fine — Blue Boy is placidly up on the piano as his owner has asked — when suddenly a piano leg gives way and Ollie is left literally holding things up, about a ton of piano and horse. Stan rises to his usual degree of helpfulness as the horse, in a bravura performance, keeps nudging his derby off his head and Stan opts to keep retrieving the hat rather than help with the crisis at hand. They finally get the piano leg wedged back under the instrument, but not before Ollie's head gets squished between the two.
The three agents of The Boys' undoing all then converge in a perfect storm of bad luck: the millionaire's mother returns home (and gives the funniest look to her bizarrely deformed statue), the police arrive with the real Blue Boy, the recovered painting, and the refreshed millionaire descends from his bath to reveal the misunderstanding. Ollie twiddles his tie, apologies for the "faux pas" and he and Stan and Blue Boy make a hasty exit, followed by the irate millionaire with a shotgun. In the process, the priceless painting gets knocked to the floor on top of one of the detectives, whose face pops through the canvas in the exact right spot, replacing Blue Boy's face.
The short ends with a favorite Roach finale — a gag at the expense of a cop. This one has the officer as the literal butt of the joke: his rump is still smoking from the pellets delivered by the millionaire's shotgun.
Wrong Again contains a sight gag that modern audiences likely won't recognize. When The Boys first bring their equine meal ticket into the house, Stan lifts the lid off an urn, ties Blue Boy's rein to it and drops it on the floor — as if this lightweight trinket is going to halt the movement of the horse if he chooses to ambulate about the premises. 1929 audiences would laugh at this, because the insubstantial lid is a visual dead ringer for an item still common in 1929: a horse anchor. Drivers of horsedrawn wagons making deliveries would literally "drop anchor" while they ran their delivery into a house; the horse would be discouraged from wandering by the 25-pound weight of the anchor. Of course, the lightweight lid used by Stan would be totally ineffectual for the purpose. This is not the only appearance of a horse anchor in the L&H canon: they also have one at the ready in their geriatric Model T in the 1934 short Going Bye-Bye! to discourage it from wandering away.
The working title of Wrong Again was Just the Reverse, a reference to the 180-degree hand-twist gesture that is a running gag throughout the film. L&H historian Randy Skretvedt writes that the gesture was a running gag around the Roach Lot of Fun as well: creative sparkplug Leo McCarey would remind the writers that a dramatic episode could be infused with comedy by applying just a twist — a twist to make it funny. The gesture became a staple of writer-to-writer communication around the studio.[1]
The stable scenes were shot at the posh Los Angeles sports complex, polo field and ranch known as the Uplifters' Club in Rustic Canyon.[1]
Wrong Again is one of the half-dozen silent Laurel and Hardy two-reelers that were made with a synchronized music and sound effects track; after its initial theatrical run in 1929, it was elbowed into obscurity in the vault by the "all-talking" shorts that followed. For years, if it was seen at all, it was seen mostly as a home-edition 8mm or 16mm film, and as such, almost always without its soundtrack. Fans' reactions to the film seem to skew with sound: those who know it best as a silent think less of it, those who discovered it with its music track rate it much higher.
Critic William K. Everson was among the first to cast a critical eye on the Laurel and Hardy films. Writing of Wrong Again in 1967, when the Victor soundtrack discs were thought to be irretrievably lost, he wrote:
Surrealism has also been cited — "This entertaining film is one of Laurel and Hardy's most bizarre" — by silent film authority Bruce Calvert[3] while prolific critic Leslie Halliwell (who most likely only ever saw it as a silent) takes the exact opposite stand: "Pleasing but not very inventive star comedy."[4]
Perhaps Glenn Mitchell sums it up best in his book The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia:
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