Laurel und Hardy: Als Salontiroler

Laurel and Hardy play mouse trap salesmen, who go to Switzerland to sell some mouse traps.There they of course get in many troubles.Swiss Miss offers some very funny scenes with the boys, like the scene with Stanley and the dog and the scene where the boys try to move a piano up to the mountains.Swiss Miss is a great Laurel and Hardy comedy from 1938.And the gorilla is a nice add to the movie.

Laurel and Hardy are travelling through Switzerland selling mouse traps (unsuccessfully it has to be said). When a man offers to buy the business from them, Hardy accepts and takes the foreign money. After the duo eat a large meal at a posh hotel they find that the note is worthless in Switzerland and are forced to work in the hotel to pay off their debt (and pay for every plate they break). While they are there they also get involved in a marital spat between a composer and his famous singer wife.

As someone who has seen more of their shorts than I have of their features, I was worried that a longer running time (70 minutes) would be too much for the duo to sustain. Having seen other features I knew they COULD do it if they were given the chance – sadly here they weren't given that chance. Instead they are given surprisingly little screen time and not allowed to work their magic for very long, with an off-putting amount of time devoted to the martial problems I have previously alluded to.

I don't know who made the decision that Laurel and Hardy were unable to carry a feature and required a structure to base their routines around - they should always be within the structure! The mistake shines through though in several funny scenes where Laurel and Hardy are given the good material – the gorilla (in Switzerland!) on a bridge may not make much sense but it is funny, although my highlight was Laurel trying to coax brandy out of a St Bernard's! Sadly the chances for them to produce are limited by the tradition (and overdone) song and dance numbers (where we also have the usual `Laurel does funny voice' stuff) and the romantic subplot.

Hardy is good as is Laurel, but Laurel's character is much stronger than in the shorts – he still bears the brunt of stuff but he is more forceful than before, not to mention a lot chubbier! I personally didn't take to this as well as I'd hoped I would – for whatever reason the changes were made, they off balanced the relationship that I love between the two. The support cast are roundly OK but it is hard to get interested in them simply because, while they are on, Laurel and Hardy aren't.

Overall this is a very weak feature from the usually reliable pair. The majority of the running time is taken up by the songs and the romantic subplot, with the duo only given a few chances to shine (which, happily, they take). In the 70 minutes it took to watch this I could have watched three of their shorts – each of which would have been better than this!

Swiss Miss would have been far far better had Hal Roach dispensed altogether with the operetta format and just allowed Stan and Ollie to do their thing. Away from them the film sinks like the Titanic.

Walter Woolf King and Greta Natzler are the husband and wife romantic leads and there's a strain in their relationship. He's a composer, she's a singer and poor Walter is jealous of the attention she gets and no one pays attention to what he writes. He goes off to the Alps to compose his masterpiece. She follows him there.

The banter and the songs are typical of a MacDonald/Eddy film, but Nelson and Jeanette never had to sing stuff like I Can't Get Over the Alps and the Cricket Song. They wouldn't have had careers if they did.

Interestingly enough the bit with King composing the Cricket Song after hearing their chirping is similar to Jerome Kern hearing a bird call and getting I've Told Every Little Star out of it. Of course it wasn't Jerome Kern who gave us the Cricket Song.

Walter Woolf King who's best known as the egotistical Lespari from A Night at the Opera just doesn't come across as a good guy. Maybe with better material Allan Jones could have done this part.

But with Stan and Ollie the film is enjoyable. They've got some classic bits, Laurel trying to steal some brandy from a St. Bernard, drilling holes in a shopkeeper's floor and hitting a gas line for their trouble and best of all the insane idea of moving an upright piano across a rope bridge and encountering an escaped gorilla.

Mute the sound whenever Stan and Ollie aren't around and you might enjoy Swiss Miss.

You know you are in trouble when Laurel and Hardy don't make their appearance in this film until the six minute mark!! Despite their being the funniest comedy team in the world, the studio insisted on sticking too many diversions into the film--including lots of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy-style songs and portions where the dialog is done in rhyme! With any comedy team, usually the more songs the more bland the film and this film is certainly no exception. Only a maniac would have thought of doing this or adding rhymes in a film like this!

And, speaking of maniacs, whose idea was it to include a guy in a gorilla suit?! The idea of a "wild gorilla" running about the Swiss mountains just doesn't make any sense--even in a comedy.

Most of the movies in the latter portion of Laurel and Hardy's careers were rather poor and stale. Of the movies made from the late 1930s on, perhaps the best are Blockheads and A Chump at Oxford. While not as bad as the 20th Century Fox Laurel and Hardy pictures or Atoll K, this movie just isn't up the quality of their earlier pictures. Simply put, the duo are looking rather old and ragged and the jokes that worked well the first few times look a bit stale here.

My advice, see something else or else you might not appreciate this comedy team. This is far from their "A game".

I think this picture gets bashed undeservedly. By 1938 Hal Roach was branching out into other movie genres, and he liked adding music to comedy and comedy to adventure. Laurel and Hardy had been successful in "The Devil's Brother" and "Babes in Toyland", and this film was not a stretch from those. He added good sets, a better than usual supporting cast, and popular music to this picture. Stan, for his part, created gags that were unusual for the team, such as the St. Bernard scene, the piano-bridge scene, and the organ scene. Both men were in the 40's; Stan had been ill and Oliver was really adding weight, and they were less than believable doing banana peel slide routines any more. They all tried mightily to produce a pleasant hybrid movie, but because it wasn't traditional L&H picture they got resentment instead. The light was visible at the end of the tunnel for Stan and Ollie by this time, and they attempted a direction change they hoped would retain their place as major stars.