Fantômes déchaînés

Laurel and Hardy agree to transport a coffin containing a corpse. But after it becomes mixed up with a stage magician's coffin, Stan and Ollie end up as magician's assistants and find themselves entangled with gangsters who were smuggling one of their number in the coffin.

This is often unfairly dismissed as a turkey. It isn't one of L & H's greatest films, but it contains plenty of memorable points including a hilarious Indian rope trick as well as the duo being fooled into buying a 'money-making machine', Ollie hiding in a box which turns out to be a stage prop used in the 'death of 1000 cuts' trick. Dante the magician is an interesting character, the plot is well-written and there are some imaginate sets.

As I said, it's not one of L & H's best, but it's still a classic and certainly more than worth watching.

8 out of 10

10 Stars.

I have to tell you something. Laurel and Hardy's later films WERE good comedies. Lots of critics have given them a thumbs down. These films made millions of dollars for Fox (notice how critics don't mention that!) and had a following. They have survived the test of time and, in fact, were the first to be released to television.

A HAUNTING WE WILL GO was the team's second film for Fox, designed to keep up with the antics of Abbott and Costello (who had released HOLD THAT GHOST!). They had a bigger budget and a solid cast of character actors, including world famous Dante, the Magician in this episode. There's some debate this may have been a re-worked script, originally planned for CHARLIE CHAN. The series was cancelled by Fox earlier in the year, and producers put all their attention on Laurel and Hardy. It worked.

Here you have a coffin, a missing corpse and a bunch of sly crooks. Sounds like something Charlie Chan would have gotten himself into. Additionally, some genuinely classic scenes have the boys assisting Dante, master illusionist. Alfred Werker directed these bits beautifully, and with a few special effects. The setting is also very elaborate, boasting a large cast of extras.

After watching this comedy for decades, and for some reason, always on a Sunday afternoon, it's still a treat, particularly the whodunit to WHO ending. Lois Laurel, Stan's daughter, claimed these films were fun, and in fact, Oliver Hardy was said to have enjoyed making them. His favorite was JITTERBUGS, released soon after this production.

Goofy dialogue and one-liners tossed in by Lou Breslow, who also wrote the original story. The phony money machine bit with bug-eyed waiter Mantan Moreland is a gem.

Look for the (censured) backward statue. Ollie's double-take is hilarious. Note the cartoon characters at the start of the film credits, which showed the art department really loved their work. Yes, there are many publicity photos of the boys in costume, still in circulation to this day. Some of the photos have been restored in color and they look great.

In box sets of three films each, released by Cinema Classics, 2006.

Because of this Laurel and Hardy film's poor reputation, I decided to watch this with Scott MacGillivray's commentary first before seeing it without. With the commentary, I appreciated many of the visual gags like various accidents from Stan's umbrella or the entire rope trick with Stan rising and falling with it depending on Ollie's playing or not of the clarinet. Of note is that Sheila Ryan appears in her second L & H movie a year after her first with the boys, Great Guns. Also, a couple of men who bilk Stan and Ollie on the train, Richard Lane and Robert Emmett Keane, would subsequently appear with them on The Bullfighters (Lane), The Dancing Masters (Keane), and Jitterbugs (Keane). Anyone interested in African-American comics of the '40s will probably want to check this one out to see both Mantan Moreland and Wille Best as waiters on a train though Mantan makes more of an impression here when he laughs at the boys' obviously fake money they thought was real because of the machine they saw Lane and Keane make different dollar bills from that they bought. As a fan of It's a Wonderful Life, it was certainly a treat for me to see Frank Faylen (Ernie the taxi driver) try to throw L & H off the train. While Stan and Ollie do provide plenty of laughs especially in a scene concerning two telephone booths from Dante the Magician that provide some nice double exposure of them, the gangster scenes, with one of them being Elisa Cook, Jr. of The Maltese Falcon, are mostly too serious to suit a Laurel and Hardy flick. That lion segment with them was funny though. Compared to the boys' Hal Roach output, this Fox entry doesn't come close quality-wise but A-Haunting We Will Go shouldn't be considered bottom-of-the barrel either. P.S. One of the children that was admiring Dante on the train was Terry Moore, who later became the leading lady on Mighty Joe Young.

Laurel and Hardy are bamboozled into smuggling a gangster, disguised as a corpse in a coffin, from one city to another but complications arise when the coffin is switched with a coffin used in a magician's act. This film, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, doesn't approach the charm of even their weakest feature produced by the Hal Roach Studios, but I don't think this is necessarily Laurel and Hardy's worst film. There are a few laughs, sporadic as they may be. The main problem is that the comedy is too generic, it doesn't grow out of the personas they painstaking developed over the years. One could just as easily imagine Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby doing the Indian Rope trick gag. The production values are better than the Roach films, but production value is a poor substitute for comedy. The predicament can be summed up in the casting. In this film the boys are menaced by Elisha Cook, Jr.. Don't get me wrong. I think Elisha Cook, Jr., is an terrific supporting actor, but against Humphrey Bogart, not Laurel and Hardy. The boys are better menaced by a comic heavy like Walter Long.

Still, although many Laurel and Hardy fans castigate Fox and MGM for their treatment of the duo during the 1940s, I don't honestly see how it could have been much different anywhere in Hollywood. Laurel and Hardy were products of the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of screen comedy. The 1940s were the nadir of comedy. By the time "A Haunting We Will Go" hit the screens in 1942, all of the greats were all essentially gone. Chaplin was inactive, and never returned to the comedy which made him great. Harold Lloyd had retired. Buster Keaton's career was in ruins. W.C. Fields' career was over. The Marx Brothers' film career was essentially over. Even the Ritz Brothers only had two more films in them. When you look at Laurel and Hardy in the context of their peers, it is a great testimony to their popularity that their film career continued as long as it did. The 1940s would forever belong to Abbott and Costello and Bob Hope, the likes of whom would make some funny films, but decade never had the comic vitality of the 1930s.

This movie is like all Laurel & Hardy's '40's movies; Too much talking and not enough slapstick. And has an overwritten story and it relies too much on the script, rather than on Laurel & Hardy's antics and talent. Yes of course they get some slapstick to do but it doesn't feel as anything new or truly great, though the movie certainly does have its moments, which help to make this movie worthwhile.

The story is rather weak but above all really uninteresting. The title is deceiving and certainly has nothing to do with the movie.

Dante, a magician from the 20th century is in the movie too but you can wonder why. Seems like just a publicity stunt for both parties to me, since it doesn't serve a too big significant purpose for the main plot-line of the movie.

Not that this movie is bad but by Laurel & Hardy standards it still is a rather weak and bad one, that really isn't among their best work.

6/10

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