Noche de duendes

Noche de Duendes (1930)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

This here is the Spanish version of THE LAUREL AND HARDY MURDER CASE and BERTH MARKS. As fans of the comedy duo know, they couldn't subtitle films back in the day so Hal Roach got the idea of having Laurel and Hardy do their films in multiple languages. Some of the later day ones are actually pretty good but this film here falls well short of both films' American versions. This is especially true for THE LAUREL AND HARDY MURDER CASE, which I've always felt was one of their best films. The biggest problem is that the duo are pretty bad with their Spanish here and it hurts many of the jokes. A lot of times it seems as if both actors are struggling to get their lines out and I think all of their attention being on the lines also hurts some of their physical humor. The BERTH MARKS sequences here are pretty much the same as the American one but just not as funny. The MURDER CASE here is quite different but it's just not nearly as funny. This here is certainly for die-hard L&H fans who want to see everything that the men did.

The main difference of this Spanish language version of 'The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case' is that Fred Kelsey no longer plays the detective; although its also considerably longer than the American original since it also includes the sleeping car sequence from 'Berth Marks' - complete with a preCode shot of a young lady in her scanties - before it even reaches the old dark house that provided the setting for the original.

The English version had already contained much more slapstick than usual and the boys show more belligerence to each other than usual, with their difficulties in getting comfortable in the sleeping car on the journey repeated when they attempt to retire for the night upon their arrival.

In the early 1930s, Hal Roach Studios realized that it's world famous duo, Laurel and Hardy, would be losing revenue now that talkies were widely available. With silent films, it was easy to change the inter-title cards in order to make versions of their films for export. However, with the talking pictures the studios hadn't yet perfected dubbing so it was decided to make some Italian, German, French and Spanish language Laurel and Hardy films by having the duo speak their lines in various languages phonetically.

This film is different, however, because it had about the worst pronunciation by the duo of any of their Spanish language films. While Ollie got better in later films, here he's pretty bad and Stanley is just awful. To make things worse, many of the original American cast also appeared and several of them were equally bad. In subsequent films, most of the cast (if not all) were native speakers. Here, it must be awfully frustrating for Spanish speakers to have to listen to what sounds like first year Spanish class! As for the film, it's a combination of two shorts (THE LAUREL AND HARDY MURDER CASE and BERTH MARKS). While BERTH MARKS is pretty much the same as the English language one, the MURDER CASE is simply terrible since it was much more language intensive and the language was so horribly maimed! Probably as a result, the energy level of this film is much lower than the original film and it just plods.

Overall, this is a pretty poor effort and is only of interest to huge fans of Laurel and Hardy like myself.