La bohémienne

In one of Laurel & Hardy's least-seen films Stan not the first time plays the brains of the outfit as he and Hardy cross to the wrong side of the law as a pair of gypsy pickpockets wearing funny hats Bob Hope would have envied in the only film they made with lovely but ill-fated Thelma Todd.

What a good thing it is that Laurel and Hardy movies are not open to great critical debate. That way, you don't have to worry that The Bohemian Girl isn't one of their better efforts. We don't have to argue that, as with the fitfully amusing Swiss Miss, the operatic elements fail to gel and should have been removed. Yes, as a music-free short this would have been vastly superior, but so what? Laurel and Hardy aren't satirists; they don't indulge in Freudian critiques or social commentary, and all the better for it.

Their brand of simple, slapstick fun is submerged, but if you can wade through the irrelevant gypsy sequences then it's there, just as funny as ever. Just the simple things, like Ollie smacking himself in the face with a potato, or Stan asking a town crier ("Nine o'clock and all's well") "Say, could you tell us the time?" – then following it up by nicking his bell.

An unusually portly Stan here gets to do something I've never seen him do before – break the fourth wall with an Ollie-style double take to camera. Look at the scene where Stan steals a wallet, backflips it to Ollie with not a single look back, and Hardy catches it in his hat and curves it back onto his head – all in one fluid motion. This is the first Laurel & Hardy film I'd seen since the apocryphal Bronson Pinchot/Gailard Sartain version, For Love Or Mummy. This only serves to heighten appreciation of how good the real duo's timing was.

It is weird seeing the two as conmen, but they're still as likeable as ever. Stan even gets to do the "floating finger" routine. Other elements quite racy for 1936 include adultery and child abduction. Yet great visual gags abound – "Give me part of the banana" orders a bossy Hardy before Stan hands him the skin. There's even some surreal stuff, like Stan's female/deep singing voices and his stretchy ear. Okay, both of those are throwbacks to Way Out West, but if they work, why not use ‘em? A classic four-minute scene has Laurel getting inadvertently drunk while trying to fill bottles of wine.

The somewhat overbearing opera fixations are even punctured by a Stan who eats Ollie's breakfast because he doesn't know how long a song will take to finish. There's even room for James Finlayson to get in on the act.

Yes, The Bohemian Girl isn't Laurel and Hardy at their best. Yet when even their average films are this funny, then who cares?

I disagree that this is the worst Laurel & Hardy film, but it is not their best either. The plot is simple and tedious with uninspired music, but the moments with Stan & Ollie still sparkle with crisp routines and character relationships. Stan's magic tricks are a real delight and Ollie's conflict with Mae Busch are classic. If you want the worst - check out "Utopia" - that's sadness personified.

When I watched this again on a Video Treasures VHS tape, I also rewatched the home movies provided and narrated by Stan Laurel's daughter, Lois, as she told of her father and Uncle Babe Hardy's trip to Europe during the early '30s to crowds nearly everywhere as we see some amusing antics they supposedly ad-libbed in front of their fans. We then see color footage of Stan at his home during the '60s admiring his honorary Oscar-which his daughter says he wished he had received with Babe when he was still alive and which he referred to as "Mr. Clean"-and making fun of it by putting glasses in front of it. As for the movie proper, Stan & Ollie are very funny-as always-and Stan especially is hilarious when he accidentally gets drunk trying to bottle some beer! The straight plot involving them as gypsies and their cohorts almost threatens to take over at some points especially when those cohorts start singing but most of it is tolerable, at best. So on that note, The Bohemian Girl is worth a look for L & H fans. P.S. This was Our Gang member Darla Hood's only time she performed with the boys on film. She's mostly held by Oliver Hardy though when she recounted her time with the boys, she had this to say to Leonard Maltin & Richard W. Bann in their book, "The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang": "They were so marvelous, Hardy was a bit more serious, and reserved, but Laurel apparently just loved children, and he'd always pick me up, and hold me, play games. I remember one time I wanted to sit and make mud pies, and he sat right down on the ground with me and helped me mold my mud pies!" Thelma Todd had a large role originally but after she tragically died on December 16, 1935-five days after the preview-she was only at the beginning with her dubbed song. As a result, Zeffie Tilbury-who would subsequently appear as an elderly friend of Our Gang in Second Childhood-was added as a gypsy queen, Antonio Moreno would now be paired with Mae Busch-making her characterization a little uneven having to be both romantic to him and still mean to hubby Ollie & his friend Stan, and Felix Knight-Tom-Tom in L & H's Babes in Toyland-sang a song originally meant for Moreno. By that way, that freak ending was funny but it was also a bit abrupt!

THE BOHEMIAN GIRL (1936)

Aspect ratio: 1.37:1

Sound format: Mono

(Black and white)

Two bumbling gypsies (Stan 'n' Ollie) are left holding the baby when Ollie's wife (Mae Busch) steals the infant daughter of a contemptuous nobleman (William P. Carleton).

The last of three L&H vehicles based on popular comic operas (following FRA DIAVOLO and BABES IN TOYLAND). Derived from a work by Michael William Balfe, THE BOHEMIAN GIRL is theatrical in every sense of the word, with its exaggerated performances (by everyone except Stan and Ollie), cramped sets and predictable plot. Some of the songs are lovely (particularly the ode to Ollie's fatherly love, sung at breakfast by Julie Bishop, here billed as 'Jacqueline Wells'), but most are rendered quaint by antiquity. Ollie is just as punctilious and accident-prone as ever, but Stan steals the picture with effortless grace, getting drunk on home-made wine and saving Bishop from Carleton's misguided nobleman. Favorite gag: After being told that Ollie has become a father, Stan shakes his hand and declares, "I hope you grow up to be as good a mother as your father was!". Mae Busch plays Ollie's duplicitous wife, and L&H regular James Finlayson turns up in a bit part as one of Carleton's guards. Though previewed in 1935, the movie underwent extensive re-editing following the death of co-star Thelma Todd, who appears only briefly in the finished version as the gypsy queen's daughter. Directed by James W. Horne and Charles Rogers.