Great Guns

The 1940s were not kind to Laurel and Hardy. First, they looked very old--time had not been very kind to them, especially Stan Laurel. Second, Ollie now weighed in at about 350 pounds and simply was too rotund to do all the physical humor the duo had done in the 1930s. And finally, after SAPS AT SEA (1940), the team unwisely left Hal Roach Studio--making films for RKO, Fox and other studios that seemed to have no idea what to do with them. Overall, these movies are dreadful--terribly unfunny and sad for most Laurel and Hardy fans to watch.

Perhaps among the best of these poor films was GREAT GUNS. While the film wasn't particularly funny, it also was reasonably diverting and at least the team didn't embarrass themselves. However, at the onset, the film has one major strike against it. Like almost all of these 40s films, Stan and Ollie are NOT the whole show, so to speak. Instead, they are most supporting characters--something they almost never did in their earlier films. In DANCE MASTERS (1943), Stan and Ollie help out a guy and girl who are in love but whose parents don't approve, in NOTHING BUT TROUBLE (1944), they help out young prince and here in GREAT GUNS, they follow a guy into the cavalry who supposedly is too sickly to serve. It seems that in the 40s, Stan and Ollie now are no longer comedians, but social workers of sorts!

At the onset, you must completely suspend disbelief to watch this film. After all, the boys are both about 50 and Ollie must weigh as much as a tank. No army is THAT desperate for men! However, despite the improbability of the plot and that the team are more supporting players, GREAT GUNS has a few pluses. Stan and Ollie's war film isn't great but compares reasonably well to other contemporary films such as BUCK PRIVATES, CAUGHT IN THE DRAFT and MR. WINKLE GOES TO WAR. Also, while not super-funny, there are a few good moments and I did laugh a few times--something I NEVER did with many of the other 1940s films they made.

Overall, if you are not a fan of the team or know little about them, don't watch this film. It will not particularly impress you or you might assume it's like their earlier work--which it isn't. However, if like me you are a rabid fan, then at least this one won't make you cringe and it's a harmless diversion.

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.

Under the watchful eye of producer Hal Roach, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy moved from silent shorts in the 1920s to feature length talkies in the 1930s to become one of the world's best loved comedy double acts. At Roach's studios Laurel in particular was given the freedom he needed to refine the duo's act, working as writer and producer on a number of films. By the end of the decade, with scores of classic shorts and features behind them, relations between the double act and Roach were strained beyond breaking point, and Laurel and Hardy left the studio - and their glory days - behind them.

Great Guns was the first proper film of the post-Roach era, The Flying Deuces with RKO something of a one-off. The move to Twentieth Century Fox in 1941 brought down these giants of comedy in four short years, assigning them to the B unit where little care was taken and little interest shown in what was being made. Their talent wasted by the talentless men who surrounded them, the Laurel and Hardy we loved were dismantled, simplified and bastardised.

In Great Guns we find them as gardener and chauffeur to a sickly rich kid drafted in spite of being allergic to everything. When the army medical proves there's nothing wrong with him he eagerly jumps into uniform, with Stan and Ollie joining him to make sure their master is well looked after.

The change in the duo is jarring, Fox's fumble immediately noticeable. Here we see not the gentle troublemakers we remember, nor the ambitious under-achievers content in their delusion that they can better themselves. As gardener and chauffeur they are servile, loyal, self-sacrificing. They know their place, and that there they belong; none of Ollie's arrogance here, no petty one-upmanship with exasperated authority figures. Gone are the childlike, naïve little strugglers, our charming anarchists replaced by simple idiots. This wasn't just a botched attempt to move them on; it was a fundamental misunderstanding of their appeal.

This isn't Laurel and Hardy. Look at how Ollie's size is now handled; with joke after joke about his waistline, we see him compared to a blimp and a weather balloon as people queue up to tell him how fat he is. In their glory days the joke was Ollie's agility in spite of his girth, his delicate finger taps and tie waving. Now the joke is his girth. He's fat. We get it. The same subtle treatment is extended to Stan's simple-mindedness. He was always in a world of his own but before all we needed was one of Ollie's withering looks to tell us so. Here people just call him an idiot, name-calling a poor substitute for punchlines. It makes their act too blatant, as if Fox wanted to assure us they understood what the boys were all about.

The Flying Deuces showed that the duo could work well enough without Hal Roach, but to do so they had to have solid writing and directing, with input from Stan Laurel. At Fox they were just actors, and actors saddled with poor scripts and no creative control. Simon Louvish's biography tells how Oliver Hardy would sit at home going over the Fox scripts, shaking his head in disbelief as his character was betrayed; a terribly sad picture to imagine. Beyond its poorly handled characterisation, Great Guns just isn't funny, with Penelope the crow an obvious example. Consider, too, the drippy romantic subplot that keeps the boys on the sidelines for scene after scene.

We don't care about it. There's no reason to.

One of the biggest problems with the boys' wartime output was the war itself. Stan and Ollie don't belong in a world with Nazism. They'd been in the army countless times before, but those were more innocent times. Here our heroes were confronted by such a unique evil that they were horribly out of place. They should be struggling with a piano and a flight of stairs, or fighting with James Finlayson because he won't buy a Christmas tree. Seeing them in the same world as Pearl Harbor and the holocaust is uncomfortable.

Given their reputation it's surprising to learn that the first few Fox pictures were modest successes, but it's easy enough to understand. In an age before television repeats, re-issues and re-mastering, the only chance to see the much-loved duo was in their new films, and even a below-par Laurel and Hardy were better than none at all. Today, when a short from the '20s is as available to us as the feature-length dross from the '40s, there's less reason to be so charitable. In Great Guns we can see the beginning of the end and that, however sad the end was, it was inevitable with material of this quality.

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.

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