Quel pétard!

This was not the first film that Stan and Ollie were in the army. The first one was Blockheads (1938) which saw Stanley guard the Western Front for 20 years after the war ended. This Laurel and Hardy film was the inspiration for Abbott and Costello's Buck Privates, which did very well at the box office. After that film, Fox decided to put Stan and Ollie in the army again. Unfortunately, although funny in spots, the film does not have the nice easy flow that the Stan Laurel direction pieces had. This was a major error by the Fox studio to use some hack director in place of Stan Laurel. The plot is rather lame, but Stan and Ollie keep the film from being a flop.

One of the problems - if not the fundamental problem of a feature length Laurel And Hardy movie is that there is by necessity a cast of supporting characters . By this I mean unlike their shorts from the 1930s Stan and Ollie don't feature in every scene and that means there's the feeling that you're watching something that's diluted . Be honest - would you have put time aside to watch this if GREAT GUNS wasn't a Laurel and Hardy comedy ?

This is similar to some other shorts where the duo find themselves in uniform and my opinion is prejudiced by the fact that I saw BEAU CHUMPS less than an hour before I started watching this one . Big mistake because the premise of both films aren't poles apart where Stan and Ollie find themselves giving up civilian life for the military

You have to suspend a lot of disbelief as their young boss Dan Forrester find's himself drafted in to the army and so the boys decide to volunteer to keep an eye on him . It's difficult to believe any military would want a couple of middle aged men one of which is to put it kindly overweight , but I guess if reality interceded we wouldn't have a movie

The story itself is rather threadbare and is along the lines of a gentle romantic comedy where Dan is taken to the female film developer at the barracks Ginger who is also the apple of the eye of the drill instructor Hippo . This plays out as you'd expect - light fluffy romance while you find yourself waiting for the next appearance of the comedy stars . The jokes aren't great but one very politically incorrect scene involving Hippo with his face blackened leading Stan to say " Oh how kind they've given us a porter " did make me burst out laughing

As it stands GREAT GUNS isn't a great comedy and reading the trivia section it's revealed that the studio wouldn't allow Stan Laurel to develop the screenplay as he did in the Hal Roach shorts and this undoubtedly explains why the feature length films of Laurel and Hardy in the early 1940s are missing a certain something

Great Guns was Laurel and Hardy's first film after leaving Hal Roach Studios for which their best work was done by far. 20th Century Fox might have had a much better film had they not decided to imitate the enormously successful Buck Privates which had come out earlier in the year for Universal starring that new team Abbott&Costello. Stan and Ollie did service comedies before and good ones.

Darryl Zanuck just bent the plot a little. Dick Nelson plays the pampered rich kid like Lee Bowman in the other film. He's got two maiden aunts, Mae Marsh and Ethel Griffies, who treat him like he was in a plastic bubble and a quack doctor in Ludwig Stossel who's getting rich off their hypochondria about Nelson.

Stan and Ollie are the butler and chauffeur of the estate and they join the army to look after Nelson. Truth be told he wants to join just to get away from those aunts.

After that it's a series of a lot of gags per normal for a service comedy. I'm sure that Stan and Ollie had they been given a little more creative freedom might have come up with more original stuff. One thing that I liked was Stan's pet raven who won't leave him even though he's enlisted. It turns out Penelope the raven gives the bird to the enemy in the war games finale which also was imitating Buck Privates.

And Nelson is involved in a romantic triangle with his sergeant Edmund MacDonald over the girl with photography concession at the PX, Sheila Ryan. If you're on your toes, you'll notice that the soldier who is buying his developed films from Ryan while Nelson is waiting is Alan Ladd

Best gag in the film involves Stanley trying to ditch Penelope in Ollie's pants during inspection and the havoc it causes. Second best is Ollie spilling water all over himself when Stan asks the time and then Stan doing it to him when Ollie asks for the time. Third best is the two of them hitching a ride on a target during rifle practice.

Great Guns has its moments, but it doesn't have the sustained humor of their stuff with Hal Roach.

I first knew about this, Stan & Ollie's first film after leaving the Hal Roach Studios, when reading Randy Skretvedt's book "Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies". He himself didn't have many complimentary things to say about it, noting that for the first time in his career, Stan Laurel had no creative control over the material, having been hired by 20th Century-Fox as actor only. Be that as it may, I enjoyed this the first time on VHS some 30 years ago and I still enjoy it now just watching it on YouTube. It's true that some of the characterizations of the Stan & Ollie characters is somewhat violated-they speak a little faster this time around and the two actually do wisecracks, a rarity in their work, but they still provide some good laughs despite that like when Stan has to hide a pet crow and Ollie feels discomfort when Laurel finds one! And lone screenwriter Lou Breslow at least consulted Stan on the script which avoided even more violations of the team's characterizations, such as having them fight over a woman when the Laurel characterization was established as asexual! Breslow later denied that Great Guns was inspired by the success of Abbott & Costello's Buck Privates but his initial script was revealed to have a dialogue scene that directly referenced that. (You can read what that sequence was like in my review of that A & C flick). And cameraman Glen MacWilliams, an old friend of Ollie's, does the team no favors by discarding their usual white makeup. Still, I found much to enjoy in Great Guns. So that's a recommendation. P. S. Leading lady Sheila Ryan would return in L & H's A-Haunting We Will Go as would Breslow and MacWilliams. And having now reviewed Breslow's L & H movie, I will next review his contributions of that other comedy team's film, Bud Abbott & Lou Costello in Hollywood.

I've been reading Matthew Coniam and Nick Santa Maria's terrific book "The Annotated Abbott and Costello" and they mentioned Laurel & Hardy's "Great Guns" and all the similarities it has to "Buck Privates". I'd never seen "Great Guns" before so I decided to give it a go. It's a funny movie. Sure it's very similar to "Buck Privates" but I bet service comedies of that era were probably all similar. That kind of stuff doesn't bother me. As far as "Great Guns" goes, it has quite a few laughs. There are a couple of scenes that aren't that great but, for the most part, it was a fun watch. (That said, of the two I prefer "Buck Privates".)