Têtes de pioche

This is the "boys" - Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy - it what many consider their last good comedy feature film, doing what they do best: short slapstick routines. It's almost a compilation of them, a series of routines more than a story with a plot. Stan and Ollie, between 45 and 50 years old when they made this film, were Hollywood veterans by now.

Frankly, the comedy might be considered a little too corny for today's crowd but, hey, the movie is 70 years old. If you're a fan of these two comedians you should enjoy this film. Anyway, when anyone provides a lot of gags in just under one hour, you'll hit and miss a lot....but some things will always be funny. Some are still clever, too, such as the bit with the window shade being a shadow.

You can always count on Ollie being henpecked and Stan being an airhead (he's a WWI soldier who marched in a trench for 20 years not realizing the war is long over). Of course, if you think about it, that premise has more holes in it than the proverbial swiss cheese, but who cares? A good portion of this film involves the simple fact of Ollie and Stan just trying to walk 13 flights up the stairs to Ollie's apartment, and the adventures that happen to them along the way.

After watching just 57 minutes of these guys pratfalls and slapstick routines, you'll be exhausted!

Relations with producer Hal Roach were strained when the boys made this short feature (or long short) and it wouldn't be long before they made the fateful decision to throw in their lot with 20th Century Fox, a move that would mark a slow, painful and irreversible decline. This is one of the last of the films that shows them almost consistently at the top of their game - although even here the cracks are beginning to show. When comedians start relying on re-working their own material from nearly a decade before - as Stan and Ollie do here in the final reel which is a virtual scene for scene remake of their first talkie Unaccustomed as We Are - you know something isn't right.

This one's probably best remembered for the opening sequence which sees Stan still guarding his company's trench twenty years after the end of the Great War. It's a funny idea, and the boys get a huge amount of mileage out of it. When Ollie reads about his old friend's remarkable return from the dead he naturally wants to see him again. Big mistake. Within hours of meeting up again Stan has managed to bury Ollie's car in builder's sand, drive it into his garage door, blow up his kitchen, get him into a fight with James Finlayson and send his wife packing. Added to all the usual slapstick and pratfalls are some truly surreal moments such as when Stan pulls down the shadow blinds and when he smokes a pipe made out of his thumb. Definitely one of the boy's films that can be watched over and over again.

Two War buddies - BLOCK-HEADS both - create complete chaos in & around a fancy apartment building.

Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy are once again up to their usual high jinks, dealing with frightful wives, dangerous neighbors and the homicidal tendencies of nearly every inanimate object with which they come into contact. At this point in their partnership the Boys' were firmly established as screen legends; they worked together like well-oiled machinery, producing one laugh after another.

Billy Gilbert & James Finlayson - the Boys' greatest nemesis - are on hand and in very fine form as Ollie's highly belligerent neighbors. Gilbert's Great White Hunter (`I don't bring ‘em back alive. I bring ‘em back dead. I come back alive.') is especially funny. Patricia Ellis as Mrs. Gilbert & Minna Gombell as Mrs. Hardy add to the merriment.

Movie mavens will recognize OUR GANGer Tommy Bond as the mean kid with the football.

The film's opening sequence, with newsreel footage of World War One battles, is unexpectedly grim for a comedy. Fortunately, the laughs start quickly. Best bit - Ollie, thinking Stan has lost his right leg, insists on carrying him everywhere. Stan lets him.

Do you have the feeling that the folks in the army deliberately forgot to tell Stan that World War I was over? Maybe they just didn't want the troop ship to sink on the way back from France.

If that was the case Ollie made the mistake of his life when he decided to invite his long lost buddy Stan over to meet the wife and have a good home cooked meal. Ollie's happily married now to Minna Gombell and when we first meet them he seems to be one happy well adjusted man.

Blockheads really starts when Stan is reunited with Ollie at the old soldier's home. I guess a grateful government is giving Stan free room and board for being the last man discharged from World War I. Still there's nothing like home cooking.

I think Blockheads offers us the proposition that Ollie can be a well adjusted if somewhat fatuous individual by himself. It's only apparently when he interacts with Stan that things just seem to happen.

And in fact that's what Blockheads is, a series of gags from the time that Ollie meets Stan at the home and just assumes he's an amputee because he's decided to sit a wheelchair rigged up for one. Right up to the point where big game hunter Billy Gilbert, the Hardy's next door neighbor chases the both of them out of the house because he catches Mrs. Gilbert in Ollie's pajamas. How she got in them? You have to see Blockheads to find out.

Best gag I thought was Stan dealing with an obnoxious neighbor who has just bullied Ollie into fetching the neighbor kid's football. Very priceless bit of comeuppance.

To see how in the space of an hour Laurel manages to literally become a home wrecker, catch Blockheads.

"Block-Heads" begins in WWI, where Stan and Ollie are in a platoon fighting in Europe. While Ollie and the rest of the group go into battle, Stan has to guard the post. You can tell that he's doing his job, because he continues doing it for twenty years after the war ends. After he returns to America, he and Ollie meet up again, and from there, they do their usual stuff. Probably the best scene was the football scene (I won't spoil it). But the wheelchair, temptress, garage door and kitchen all provide some laughs. They may play blockheads in the movie, but believe you me, Laurel and Hardy were comic geniuses. Gilligan and the Skipper were sort of a later version of them, and Chris Farley and David Spade were an even later version.