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This wartime comedy is one of Laurel and Hardy's first movies for Twentieth Century-Fox, so it isn't nearly as consistently funny as the ones they made at MGM. However, I found this to be very amusing and enjoyable, with many good laughs. The first half is very slow, but once they get involved with their Sergeant Hippo, it picks up a lot. Try not to laugh when Stan shoves a crow down Ollie's pants during an inspection, or when Stan and Ollie are forced to build a pontoon bridge (I liked Stan's choice of wood). All in all, this movie is ten times better than any of the comedies they come out with today and is definitely worth any L&H fans time. 8 out of 10.

One of the problems - if not the fundamental problem of a feature length Laurel And Hardy movie is that there is by necessity a cast of supporting characters . By this I mean unlike their shorts from the 1930s Stan and Ollie don't feature in every scene and that means there's the feeling that you're watching something that's diluted . Be honest - would you have put time aside to watch this if GREAT GUNS wasn't a Laurel and Hardy comedy ?

This is similar to some other shorts where the duo find themselves in uniform and my opinion is prejudiced by the fact that I saw BEAU CHUMPS less than an hour before I started watching this one . Big mistake because the premise of both films aren't poles apart where Stan and Ollie find themselves giving up civilian life for the military

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief as their young boss Dan Forrester find's himself drafted in to the army and so the boys decide to volunteer to keep an eye on him . It's difficult to believe any military would want a couple of middle aged men one of which is to put it kindly overweight , but I guess if reality interceded we wouldn't have a movie

The story itself is rather threadbare and is along the lines of a gentle romantic comedy where Dan is taken to the female film developer at the barracks Ginger who is also the apple of the eye of the drill instructor Hippo . This plays out as you'd expect - light fluffy romance while you find yourself waiting for the next appearance of the comedy stars . The jokes aren't great but one very politically incorrect scene involving Hippo with his face blackened leading Stan to say " Oh how kind they've given us a porter " did make me burst out laughing

As it stands GREAT GUNS isn't a great comedy and reading the trivia section it's revealed that the studio wouldn't allow Stan Laurel to develop the screenplay as he did in the Hal Roach shorts and this undoubtedly explains why the feature length films of Laurel and Hardy in the early 1940s are missing a certain something

This was not the first film that Stan and Ollie were in the army. The first one was Blockheads (1938) which saw Stanley guard the Western Front for 20 years after the war ended. This Laurel and Hardy film was the inspiration for Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates, which did very well at the box office. After that film, Fox decided to put Stan and Ollie in the army again. Unfortunately, although funny in spots, the film does not have the nice easy flow that the Stan Laurel direction pieces had. This was a major error by the Fox studio to use some hack director in place of Stan Laurel. The plot is rather lame, but Stan and Ollie keep the film from being a flop.

I first knew about this, Stan & Ollie's first film after leaving the Hal Roach Studios, when reading Randy Skretvedt's book "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies". He himself didn't have many complimentary things to say about it, noting that for the first time in his career, Stan Laurel had no creative control over the material, having been hired by 20th Century-Fox as actor only. Be that as it may, I enjoyed this the first time on VHS some 30 years ago and I still enjoy it now just watching it on YouTube. It's true that some of the characterizations of the Stan & Ollie characters is somewhat violated-they speak a little faster this time around and the two actually do wisecracks, a rarity in their work, but they still provide some good laughs despite that like when Stan has to hide a pet crow and Ollie feels discomfort when Laurel finds one! And lone screenwriter Lou Breslow at least consulted Stan on the script which avoided even more violations of the team's characterizations, such as having them fight over a woman when the Laurel characterization was established as asexual! Breslow later denied that Great Guns was inspired by the success of Abbott & Costello's Buck Privates but his initial script was revealed to have a dialogue scene that directly referenced that. (You can read what that sequence was like in my review of that A & C flick). And cameraman Glen MacWilliams, an old friend of Ollie's, does the team no favors by discarding their usual white makeup. Still, I found much to enjoy in Great Guns. So that's a recommendation. P. S. Leading lady Sheila Ryan would return in L & H's A-Haunting We Will Go as would Breslow and MacWilliams. And having now reviewed Breslow's L & H movie, I will next review his contributions of that other comedy team's film, Bud Abbott & Lou Costello in Hollywood.

It's time to re-evaluate the scathing history of Laurel and Hardy's post-1940 films made for 20th Century-Fox and at least give some of them a break. It's always been written that the classy Fox studio just didn't understand the comedy of Stan and Ollie, and that every film the duo did with them in the '40s is plain unfunny and a disgrace to their talents. Well, not so in my book.

GREAT GUNS was the first Fox feature for Laurel and Hardy and it was inspired by Abbott & Costello's huge army hit, BUCK PRIVATES, which had been released early the same year and made millions at the box office. Here, Stan and Ollie play two concerned mentors who decide to enlist in the U.S. army to keep an eye on their wealthy but sickly young employer, who's just been drafted and insists on serving duty against his doctor's orders. Once in uniform, L&H must contend with their classically nasty sergeant, a firing practice that goes amusingly wrong, and all sorts of other zany mishaps, the topper of which involves a black crow that winds up nesting inside Ollie's pants during a drill!

Yes, things certainly were modified a bit for Laurel and Hardy's characters in these later Fox feature films. But only we most dedicated of followers would even notice this, and even then some of us don't mind as long as we can laugh a bit (which we still do). The boys are not boys at this point, and time has marched on. We'll always have the best of their classic '30s Hal Roach talkies to fall back on when we want the cream of the crop, but there are moments to be enjoyed in the Fox films too, if we can let go and stop comparing them to something else. *** out of ****