Marchands de poisson

This is probably my all time fav. L&H short. right from the start with the call of 'Fresh Fish' (toot), this is a 'hoot'. As always, Stan has an idea this time expressed as only Stan can. 'If we had a boat .....'. The bit that makes me howl is when Olly is painting the rudder and Stan is scrubbing the deck and finds the tiller in the way. The pause before 'what did you put that stuff on your face for' is agony!. As for Stan's method of getting his head out from behind the mast... See this one now.

Laurel and Hardy have a business plan: instead of buying fish and selling it, they'll catch the fish themselves and cut out the middleman. Unfortunately, the people who are going to execute this idea are Stan and Ollie.

It's my favorite short by Laurel and Hardy. There are others just as good, but this is just them. Except for a brief appearance by Billy Gilbert (maybe seconds) to sell them a boat, it's all the Boys and the boat they are trying to recondition, right next to a big mud puddle. The inevitability of disaster is delicious, and the gags are, as usual, great.

Can it get any better than this. Stan has a great idea. Instead of working for "the Man," they should get a boat and fish themselves, thereby accruing all the profits. Since they have little money, it means buying a piece of junk boat and fixing it up. Actually, their ideas are sound and at times their skills aren't bad...but when it comes to coordination and execution, they are totally lost. As soon as they are finished trying to destroy the boat before getting it launched, things seem ship shape, if you will. But it isn't long before their mutual efforts begin to clash. Of course, as is usually the case, poor Ollie gets the worst of it. He is crunched, glued, painted, and abused. Yes, he did make the mistake of listening to his friend whose track record is anything but solid. I think the fact that their hearts are always in the right place is what made these guys so endearing. They never meant to be nasty to each other. Circumstances just didn't go their way. This effort, with really just them on the screen, except for a short scene with Billy Gilbert, shows them at their absolute best.

This film is highly reminiscent of another Laurel and Hardy short, HELP MATES. They both concern this clumsy and dopey duo trying to fix something. In HELP MATES, it was home repair and here it is fixing up an old sailboat. In fact, now that I think about it, it's pretty much the same film all over again with only some minor differences. This, though, is not that bad, as regardless it is still very entertaining and funny. I particularly liked the paintbrush goatee that Ollie is sporting late in the movie after a mishap. And the ending, is pretty much as you'd expect--a total disaster. This is pure Laurel and Hardy and, like their best material, NOT set to music or a contrived plot--just simple stupidness--the way Laurel and Hardy are meant to be seen.

While Stan & Ollie are successful fish salesmen, Stan suggests they can be even more profitable if they catch their own fish instead of buying them. So they buy a boat named Ruth (after Stan's about-to-be-second-wife) and work on it, with disastrous results, of course! Great slapstick sequences abound with Hardy, of course, getting the brunt of it. This was the last of their three films directed by George Marshall who left Hal Roach Studios after general manager Henry Ginsberg fired him over production delays. He later helmed classic films starring W. C. Fields, Bob Hope, and Martin & Lewis with a couple of solo Jerry Lewis pictures after that team split up. So as we leave Stan & Ollie attempting to go to sea, we'll next see Bud Abbott & Lou Costello at sea in In the Navy.