Habeas Corpus

Laurel and Hardy's earliest foray into Horror comedy is by no means their best,with a rather awkward opening scene with a mad doctor(Richard Carle,his only known appearance with L & H)which leads to the boys' attempted grave-robbing.There's plenty of opportunities for much comic panic here,some of which is very funny but is occasionally over-prolonged and a trifle predictable.The scenes in the graveyard recall the previous year's DO DETECTIVES THINK(1927)which didn't take up as much running time as it does here.It is sometimes thanks to Stan and Ollie's sheer and unparallelled comic brilliance that such potentially obvious gags are made fresh and inventive;for many years,a synchronised soundtrack with music and sound effects to accompany the film was thought to be lost,but has turned up in recent years and is now available on DVD.The only L&H silent now known to have lost it's music and effects recording is WE FAW DOWN,made several months after HABEAS CORPUS.

Before Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, in Robert Wise's BODY SNATCHER and also other features like John Gilling's FLESH AND THE FIENDS or Freddie Francis'BURKE AND HARE, I am surprised to see that topic of grave robbers in order to serve rogue medical experiments was used by Laurel and Hardy, in of course the most funniest way. What could I say more? The cemetery setting is also a very easy way to bring scary elements in a comedy scheme and show many gags to the audiences. I am not a Laurel and hardy specialist however but this short film seems pretty good for me, although I have not seen the other ones.

After all those decades and not only years, that is still amusing, entertaining at the most, even for youngest audiences.

But all Laurel and Hardy stuff is not so good.

This was one of the usual two-reel silent shorts that ran about twenty minutes back in the 1920s. It's reasonably effective, with one or two good laughs.

Laurel and Hardy are sent by a goofy professor to dig up a body at the graveyard, to be used in an experiment. The police, knowing of the plan, have an officer dressed in a white sheet waiting for them.

I think the best gag comes when the boys are trying to climb over the cemetery wall. Hardy cups his palms but Laurel only seems to bounce up and down on them. They try various other ways to get Laurel over the wall and they all fail. Finally, Hardy tells Laurel to bend over. Hardy will make a running jump and leap over the barrier. He doesn't make it. He smashes into the thick brick wall -- and all the way through it. Hardy wasn't too fond of jokes about his weight and that seems to make the gag a little funnier.

Otherwise, it's good but hardly incomparable.

Mad scientist Richard Carle is musing that he needs a human brain for his research. There's a knock on the door, and it's Laurel and Hardy. So he sends them to the graveyard to dig one up.

It had been more than a years since DO DETECTIVES THINK had contained a funny graveyard scene, and there's a lot here to suggest that. There's a tremendous amount of spooky shadows by the wall, the Boys are terrified, ad so forth. There are also plenty of new gags, and a long, fully ornamented scene of them trying to get over a wall. Stan was a great gag technician who could direct his own movies. Here he's working with James Parrott, who also was a fine gagman.

I don't understand the occasional low ratings I've read by viewers of this great '20s silent film.

It's early vintage Laurel & Hardy with a very good demonstration of most aspects of their particular brand of physical humor and emotional reactions to each other and their situations.

Done in 1928 in the Hal Roach studio, a silent film historian said it's the beginning, in a sense--a preview, or first chapter, of what was to become a great series of longer comedy escapades.

One can only downgrade this film by judging it against Laurel & Hardy's other, later, longer and more fully developed films.