On a gaffé

This film features Laurel and Hardy in a very familiar plot. As is often the case, the boys go out to play and lie to the wives about it--with disastrous results. This type of situation was featured in several films made by the team (such as THEIR PURPLE MOMENT and BLOTTO) and was remade very closely in SONS OF THE DESERT. In fact, after Laurel and Hardy, this same plot was reworked on "The Honeymooners" and even "The Flintstones"!

In this film, Stan and Ollie go out for a good time and meet two ladies who eventually ask them back to their apartment. What they don't know is that the wives suspect the boys are playing around and one of the lady has a boyfriend who is a professional boxer! The wives actually catch them in the act but Stan and Ollie don't know it--and there is a very, very long segment where the boys make up lie after lie to explain themselves. This leads to an expectedly violent confrontation. The end was cute and repeated very closely in BLOCKHEADS. While there's a lot of familiar material in this short, it is very well done and funny.

Just a quick note to say that this movie is silent, but was nevertheless released with music and effects on Vitaphone discs. The discs has been found, and at least the German Kinowelt DVD release of Sons of the Desert has We Faw Down as an bonus, complete with the music and effects track.

It is always a bonus to watch the silent Laurel & Hardy comedies with the proper, original music and effects track. This brings us a little bit closer to the film's original state.

In general, the Vitaphone system did not last very long, but the system of having soundtracks stored separately does open the possibility of restoring soundtracks even if the film element has been put together from various prints.

Just watched this Laurel & Hardy comedy on Hulu as linked from IMDb. In this one, Stan & Ollie are trying to get to a poker game but their wives seemed determined to keep them at home. So when someone from there calls, Ollie takes it and addresses him as Boss so he could fool the spouses that he and Stan are going to the Orpheum Theater to see a live show with him. After they leave, they meet a couple of ladies after one of them misplaces a hat...I'll stop there and just say while there's not too much slapstick here (though the give-and-take between Stan and one of the ladies was pretty funny), there is some highly amusing pantomime between the boys when they try to describe what they saw in the show as the wives can only grimace at what they know are bald-faced lies. Don't want to reveal much more than that so I'll just say I recommend We Faw Down. P.S. On YouTube, there's an "extended" version which puts nearly the entirety of Laurel & Hardy's next short, Liberty, in the middle of it. This is obviously because those scenes were originally part of this short but had to be cut for time constraints.

Once more the famous two get in some serious trouble with their wives, after a series of unfortunate incidents, which forces them to come up with a lie, which of course only make their situation even worser...

The jokes remain funny, even after they are repeated multiple times in the movie. The events leading up to the confrontation with the two wives are both wonderfully constructed and executed and filled with some typical slapstick humor. The movie knows to remain constantly funny throughout the whole movie which makes this a very consistent comedy to watch.

The ending might have some slow moments in it and might not be as funny as the first part of the movie, it doesn't really make the movie less pleasant to watch. "We Faw Down" is good enough for more than a few laughs and it shows Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy once more in top-form and their chemistry and timing is spot-on!

Perhaps not as memorable and good as other Laurel & Hardy pictures but still an entertaining and watchable comedy-short from the famous comical duo.

7/10

http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

WE FAW DOWN

Aspect ratio: 1.33:1

Sound format: Silent

(Black and white - Short film)

Stan 'n' Ollie get mixed up with a couple of floozies (Kay Deslys and Vera White) after setting out to visit a theatre which burns down in their absence! Needless to say, their tyrannical wives (Vivien Oakland and Bess Flowers) are not amused...

Leo McCarey's OK comedy laid the narrative framework for William Seiter's masterpiece SONS OF THE DESERT (1934), with L&H playing brow-beaten victims of circumstance, forced to tell a monstrous lie which backfires in spectacular fashion. Much of it is very funny, especially the scene in which Stan is teased by Deslys, leading to a violent game of push and shove. However, some of the fun is undercut by Oakland and Flowers, playing their roles completely straight, which adds an element of unpleasantness to the 'henpecked husband' scenario. Originally released in the UK as WE SLIP UP.