Habeas Corpus

This was one of the usual two-reel silent shorts that ran about twenty minutes back in the 1920s. It's reasonably effective, with one or two good laughs.

Laurel and Hardy are sent by a goofy professor to dig up a body at the graveyard, to be used in an experiment. The police, knowing of the plan, have an officer dressed in a white sheet waiting for them.

I think the best gag comes when the boys are trying to climb over the cemetery wall. Hardy cups his palms but Laurel only seems to bounce up and down on them. They try various other ways to get Laurel over the wall and they all fail. Finally, Hardy tells Laurel to bend over. Hardy will make a running jump and leap over the barrier. He doesn't make it. He smashes into the thick brick wall -- and all the way through it. Hardy wasn't too fond of jokes about his weight and that seems to make the gag a little funnier.

Otherwise, it's good but hardly incomparable.

What would happen if Dr Frankenstein sent Laurel and Hardy to get a dead body instead of Igor? This is a very funny silent for the boys, and something of a departure. The scared stiff shtick wasn't usually their thing, but they pull it off nicely. They're still developing their chemistry here, but it works very well. The more familiar gags abound along with the Eek! a ghost! bits. Very worth a watch.

Before Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, in Robert Wise's BODY SNATCHER and also other features like John Gilling's FLESH AND THE FIENDS or Freddie Francis'BURKE AND HARE, I am surprised to see that topic of grave robbers in order to serve rogue medical experiments was used by Laurel and Hardy, in of course the most funniest way. What could I say more? The cemetery setting is also a very easy way to bring scary elements in a comedy scheme and show many gags to the audiences. I am not a Laurel and hardy specialist however but this short film seems pretty good for me, although I have not seen the other ones.

After all those decades and not only years, that is still amusing, entertaining at the most, even for youngest audiences.

But all Laurel and Hardy stuff is not so good.

Starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Habeas Corpus is directed by James Parrott and photographed by Len Powers. Plot finds Stan and Ollie as a couple of drifters short of cash who agree to do a bit of grave robbing to earn themselves $500, courtesy of the mad professor Padilla (Richard Carle). But the cemetery at night is not a fun place to be...

Not so much Burke & Hare, more like Berk & Berk!

Not a prime short from the boys but lots to enjoy. The frenetic organ swirls as Stan & Ollie prat about down at the cemetery. After the tone is set via a fun escapade with wet paint, the spooky shenanigans begin - which constitutes the boys scaring each other even without outside influences!

There's the usual visual ticks, the various looks at the camera, which are supplemented by some animal participation (including the world's fastest cat and a fun tortoise). An extended sequence of them trying to get over the wall of the cemetery is overplayed, but after an Ollie wrecking ball moment and a quite brilliant and hilarious body bag sequence of events, this short is back on track and showing why they would become legends of cinema. 7/10

I don't understand the occasional low ratings I've read by viewers of this great '20s silent film.

It's early vintage Laurel & Hardy with a very good demonstration of most aspects of their particular brand of physical humor and emotional reactions to each other and their situations.

Done in 1928 in the Hal Roach studio, a silent film historian said it's the beginning, in a sense--a preview, or first chapter, of what was to become a great series of longer comedy escapades.

One can only downgrade this film by judging it against Laurel & Hardy's other, later, longer and more fully developed films.