Stan and Ollie pledge a solemn oath to their masonic brotherhood (the Sons Of The Desert) to attend the annual conference in Chicago, but Ollie's wife won't let him go. They hatch a harebrained scheme to pretend he is ill and must take a sea-voyage to Honolulu to recuperate as a cover-story, but disaster awaits ...
This is arguably Laurel & Hardy's best and most famous film (though Babes In Toyland and Way Out West are also sensational), a tremendous example of their combined slapstick and character-comedy style. Like the best farce, the progressively more ridiculous situations are absurd, but the path by which they are arrived at has a wonderful logic to it. It's stuffed full of funny moments, most of which are just Laurel's bewilderingly absent-minded nuances and Hardy's exasperated annoyance, but the last reel especially, when the ruse is discovered, is simply hilarious. Produced by the great Hal Roach; Busch is fantastic as Hardy's shrill crockery-smashing wife. Seventy years later, it's sometimes hard to see why these films were so astonishingly popular, but there wasn't much to laugh about in 1933, and this film brightened millions of lives.
This is arguably Laurel & Hardy's best and most famous film (though Babes In Toyland and Way Out West are also sensational), a tremendous example of their combined slapstick and character-comedy style. Like the best farce, the progressively more ridiculous situations are absurd, but the path by which they are arrived at has a wonderful logic to it. It's stuffed full of funny moments, most of which are just Laurel's bewilderingly absent-minded nuances and Hardy's exasperated annoyance, but the last reel especially, when the ruse is discovered, is simply hilarious. Produced by the great Hal Roach; Busch is fantastic as Hardy's shrill crockery-smashing wife. Seventy years later, it's sometimes hard to see why these films were so astonishingly popular, but there wasn't much to laugh about in 1933, and this film brightened millions of lives.