Les Forçats du pinceau

Second Hundred Years, The (1927)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Laurel and Hardy play convicts who make an escape but they find themselves in a more dangerous place than prison. There's small laughs scattered throughout this short but in the end the only real highlight is seeing boys with shaved heads.

Call of the Cuckoo (1927)

** (out of 4)

A man (Max Davidson) swaps houses, sight unseen, due to his wacko neighbors. When he moves into the new house it turns out the thing is falling apart in every way possible. The only real highlight is the few scenes with the neighbors who are played by Laurel, Hardy and Charley Chase.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were comedic geniuses, individually and together, and their partnership was deservedly iconic and one of the best there was. They left behind a large body of work, a vast majority of it being entertaining to classic comedy, at their best they were hilarious and their best efforts were great examples of how to do comedy without being juvenile or distasteful.

'The Second Hundred Years' is nowhere near classic Laurel and Hardy, later films, short and feature, had stronger chemistry when fully formed and used their considerable talents better. At this point, Laurel was much funnier and more interesting while Hardy in most of the previous outings had too little to do. 'The Second Hundred Years' is still worth watching though and is an improvement on some of their previous short films, along with 'Duck Soup', 'While Girls Love Sailors' and 'Sailors, Beware!' it was up there as among Laurel and Hardy's best up to this point.

Personally would have liked more sly wit that made their later entries better.

The story is a bit busy at times and both slight and formulaic. Have to concur too with the ending sequence being too long and over-stretched.

Laurel however is very funny, and sometimes hilarious, like as was said for a few of his previous outings 'The Second Hundred Years' is worth seeing for him alone. Hardy is at least not wasted, and he does give one of his funniest and most interesting appearances of his pairings with Laurel up to this point despite his persona being not as fully formed as Laurel's. The chemistry is much more here than in previous outings of theirs if still evolving. Support is nice.

A good deal of the humour is well timed, hugely energetic and very funny, with everything going at a lively pace, and there is a lot of charm and good nature to keep one going. 'The Second Hundred Years' looks quite good.

To conclude, decent. 7/10 Bethany Cox

There are some good sight gags in this silent Laurel & Hardy comedy, but there's very little plot to speak of. The boys sport shaven heads as they play a pair of convicts attempting to escape from prison and the film follows their various doomed attempts. They dig a tunnel only to strike a water pipe and end up surfacing in the warden's office. Sent to the exercise yard, they're forced to perform exercises. They eventually escape disguised as painters but are followed by a cop and end up painting half the town in their attempts to shake him off. They find themselves back in prison when they hijack the car of a pair of French dignitaries visiting the prison.

Most of Laurel & Hardy's silent films lose some of the boy's inimitable character simply because we can't hear their voices, and this one's no exception. There are a few funny moments – when the pair instantly assume the marching position, hand on the shoulder of the man in front, when the dinner gong sounds as they're pretending to be the French dignitaries, for example, but you can't help feeling it would be more enjoyable if you could just hear them speak. When Ollie can't voice his frustration and Stan can't squeakily express his distress we only really have half the act.

Generally thought to be the first official Laurel and Hardy release(although PUTTING PANTS ON PHILLIP is also put in this bracket),the boys don't wear their Bowler hats and have their heads shaved,but are very much a team in this early effort,more so than PPOP where they play against each other rather than for.There's plenty of amusing incident and situations(especially when they attempt to escape the jail as painters);one slight quibble is that as convicts,the characters they have to play here have a very slightly more unpleasing edge than they would be establishing only a few films later in the partnership.Still funny though,and Jimmy Finlayson's double take and fade away is worth a few more laughs as well here;in early publicity material the boys were sometimes billed as 'Hardy and Laurel' in this film;that soon changed.

Stan and Ollie are in prison and are constantly trying to escape. The problem is that they are idiots and every plan they try fails. Some of them are pretty funny and some a bit too silly in this film. This is one of the earlier Laurel and Hardy films, so I'm cutting it a bit of slack in scoring it a 6. The problem is that this prison comedy, while funny, also has a couple bits where the timing is just awful and they milk gags way too long--something you'd never see in their later and more polished films.

The first of these over-long bits is when prisoners Stan and Ollie try to escape by pretending to be painters. When a guard becomes suspicious and follows them out of the prison, they start painting EVERYTHING in sight. When I was a kid and saw this, I thought it was hilarious. Now, as an adult, it just seemed stupid--and NOT in a good way! The second was the awful dining scene where Stan chases a cherry all around the table with his spoon. This "funny" bit was often seen in films before this with other comics and it just isn't funny--and it goes on and on far too long.

Overall, even poor Laurel and Hardy is pretty funny and worth seeing. So give this one a look but understand it's not up to their usual high standards.