Dos locos sueltos

Laurel and Hardy agree to transport a coffin containing a corpse. But after it becomes mixed up with a stage magician's coffin, Stan and Ollie end up as magician's assistants and find themselves entangled with gangsters who were smuggling one of their number in the coffin.

This is often unfairly dismissed as a turkey. It isn't one of L & H's greatest films, but it contains plenty of memorable points including a hilarious Indian rope trick as well as the duo being fooled into buying a 'money-making machine', Ollie hiding in a box which turns out to be a stage prop used in the 'death of 1000 cuts' trick. Dante the magician is an interesting character, the plot is well-written and there are some imaginate sets.

As I said, it's not one of L & H's best, but it's still a classic and certainly more than worth watching.

8 out of 10

10 Stars.

I have to tell you something. Laurel and Hardy's later films WERE good comedies. Lots of critics have given them a thumbs down. These films made millions of dollars for Fox (notice how critics don't mention that!) and had a following. They have survived the test of time and, in fact, were the first to be released to television.

A HAUNTING WE WILL GO was the team's second film for Fox, designed to keep up with the antics of Abbott and Costello (who had released HOLD THAT GHOST!). They had a bigger budget and a solid cast of character actors, including world famous Dante, the Magician in this episode. There's some debate this may have been a re-worked script, originally planned for CHARLIE CHAN. The series was cancelled by Fox earlier in the year, and producers put all their attention to Laurel and Hardy. It makes sense.

Here you have a coffin, a missing corpse and a bunch of sly crooks. Sounds like something Charlie Chan would have gotten himself into. Additionally, some genuinely classic scenes have the boys assisting Dante, the magician with his act. Alfred Werker directed these bits beautifully, and with a few special effects. The setting is also very elaborate, boasting a large cast of extras in the audience.

After watching this comedy for decades, and for some reason, always on a Sunday afternoon, it's still a treat, particularly the whodunit to WHO ending. Lois Laurel, Stan's daughter, claimed these films were fun, and, in fact, Oliver Hardy was said to have enjoyed making them. His favorite was JITTERBUGS, released soon after this production.

Goofy dialogue and one-liners tossed in, written by Lou Breslow, who also wrote the original story. The phony money machine bit with bug-eyed waiter Mantan Moreland is a gem.

Look for the (censured) backward statue. Ollie's double-take is hilarious. Note the cartoon characters at the start of the film credits, which showed the art department really loved their work. Yes, there are many publicity photos of the boys in costume, still in circulation to this day. Some of the photos have been restored in color and they look great.

In box sets of three films each, released by Cinema Classics, 2006.

Laurel and Hardy are bamboozled into smuggling a gangster, disguised as a corpse in a coffin, from one city to another but complications arise when the coffin is switched with a coffin used in a magician's act. This film, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, doesn't approach the charm of even their weakest feature produced by the Hal Roach Studios, but I don't think this is necessarily Laurel and Hardy's worst film. There are a few laughs, sporadic as they may be. The main problem is that the comedy is too generic, it doesn't grow out of the personas they painstaking developed over the years. One could just as easily imagine Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby doing the Indian Rope trick gag. The production values are better than the Roach films, but production value is a poor substitute for comedy. The predicament can be summed up in the casting. In this film the boys are menaced by Elisha Cook, Jr.. Don't get me wrong. I think Elisha Cook, Jr., is an terrific supporting actor, but against Humphrey Bogart, not Laurel and Hardy. The boys are better menaced by a comic heavy like Walter Long.

Still, although many Laurel and Hardy fans castigate Fox and MGM for their treatment of the duo during the 1940s, I don't honestly see how it could have been much different anywhere in Hollywood. Laurel and Hardy were products of the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of screen comedy. The 1940s were the nadir of comedy. By the time "A Haunting We Will Go" hit the screens in 1942, all of the greats were all essentially gone. Chaplin was inactive, and never returned to the comedy which made him great. Harold Lloyd had retired. Buster Keaton's career was in ruins. W.C. Fields' career was over. The Marx Brothers' film career was essentially over. Even the Ritz Brothers only had two more films in them. When you look at Laurel and Hardy in the context of their peers, it is a great testimony to their popularity that their film career continued as long as it did. The 1940s would forever belong to Abbott and Costello and Bob Hope, the likes of whom would make some funny films, but decade never had the comic vitality of the 1930s.

First things first - this is not a "horror-comedy" as I presumed it would be by the title. I mean, even the opening credits have the name of the film in ghoulish lettering along with the spooky image of a ghost leering down at Stan and Ollie, for crying out loud! But getting past that -- this is one of those oft-despised latter day "Fox films" that the aging team of Laurel and Hardy made after their greatest works at Hal Roach Studios. It's not as "heinous" as most critics make it out to be, but it's not one of their better forties movies either. In this one, the "boys" get released from a stay in jail and are told to leave town. So they meet up with a group of swindling crooks (one of them is played by a very young Elisha Cook Jr.) who need their help in traveling to Dayton, Ohio. The dopey plot is all over the place, but along the way there are some small chuckles to be had (the hitchhiking fiasco, the "Inflato" machine duping) and a few mildly cute slapstick gags. But things sink as the film goes on and "Dante the Magician" takes up too much screen time (he's even top billed along with Laurel and Hardy!) ** out of ****

One's the first picture that I'd ever seen at theatre was from this outstanding couple, which I didn't remember the name, well-known here in Brazil fondly as "the Fat and the Thin" in this picture our friends are hired to takes a coffin to another city by train, the coffin was swapped on railway station, actually inside has a living crook who is at large from the police.

Forgetting a bit the plot, there are some many gags around, they were misled by a couple of crooks who sold to them a machine that make oversized money, so they made a spensive dinner, but the machine didn't work out, more trouble ahead, arriving in the town they got a job with a great magician, but they are pursued by the coffin's gang.

These remarkable duo comics had a successful box-office here and TV as well, their DVD are available with an original dubbed version, all in my collection !!!

Resume:

First watch: 1991 / How many: 4 / Source: TV-DVD / Rating: 7.