They, being responsible citizens of course, though do join up. The rich and privileged Dan is drafted, while the hard working Stan and Ollie aren't. The stronger message though is that the draft is fair.
Joining army isn't bad at all, Dan's even happy when he's drafted. There is a lot of propaganda in this film too, something that carries through to the other movies in this set. The only problem, aside from the fact that this was lifted wholesale from and earlier Laurel and Hardy comedy, The Finishing Touch, was that the gag is used three times, killing any humor that it might have had. The one gag that is effective has Stan carrying one end of a long board off the screen, only to see him carrying the other end too. (The crow down the underwear scene is particularly bad.) They tried to turn the pair into another Abbott and Costello, loud and brash, something that Laurel and Hardy never were. The gags aren't thought out and crafted like they were in L&H's previous films.
Laurel and hardy collection vol 2 movie#
While Abbott and Costello filled their movie with some great routines that they perfected on the vaudeville stage, the writers of this movie just threw in anything that came into their minds, and just about none of it worked. This virtual remake of Buck Privates (including the war games at the end) is a really poor imitation of the original.
(Though the boys think that she's a gold digger and try to break up the romance, without success.) Meanwhile Dan has lost his heart to the girl at the photo shop, Ginger (Sheila Ryan). When they arrive at the training camp, Stan and Laurel find themselves in one mess after another ending up behind a firing range, messing up breakfast in the mess hall, and of course they are in constant trouble with Sergeant Hippo (Edmund MacDonald). When Dan gets drafted (he's happy about it too since he'll escape his doting aunts) Oliver and Hardy enlist too in order to protect their master. Stan and Laurel are domestic servants for a rich young man who's a bit frail, Dan (Dick Nelson). The boys first movie for Fox, the studio decided to cash in on the success of Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates, a runaway hit for Universal, and put Laurel and Hardy in the army. They were put into formalistic comedies that were more about keeping Washington happy by supporting the war effort (and therefore not having film stock rationed, something that the studios dreaded) than creating quality films. Instead they found themselves with poor scripts with lame gags that didn't understand the characters that the pair had refined for a decade and a half. They had no say over scripts, production values or editing, something that Stan Laurel had always had when they were with Roach. In the heyday of the studio system, Laurel and Hardy were regulated to a B-movie unit, and became cogs in a movie making machine. The pair signed with 20th Century Fox that same year and all of Laurel's creative input was also signed away. They refused to sign with Roach again, and though Stan thought that this move would give him total creative control, he was sadly mistaken. This gave the duo much less negotiating power since no other studios would sign half of Laurel and Hardy to a high paying contract, they were at Roach's mercy to a large extent. Roach had always refused to give the team a single contract, instead having each comedian under a separate contract with staggered ending dates. In 1940, feeling that they weren't getting the attention and freedom that they deserved at the Hal Roach Studios, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their own film company. With scripts written by writers who didn't understand the team's comedy style and no creative input from Stan Laurel these three films are utterly forgettable at best. Unfortunately these films are among the worst that Laurel and Hardy ever made. 20th Century Fox has also joined the parade and have put out three of the films that 'The Boys' made for that studio in the early 40's: The Laurel and Hardy Collection. Warner Brothers and TCM have recently released a pair of the duo's early features, and many of their silent shorts are available from Image. Laurel and Hardy made many uproariously funny films, and a few of them are starting to make their way on to DVD.
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