Stan and Oliver serve together in the trenches of WW1 in 1917. When Stan is left behind to guard the trench when Ollie and the rest go over the top the war is won, but no-one tells Stan. 20 years later Stan is still guarding the trench when he is discovered and returned home. Oliver, now completely under the thumb and domesticated, sees Stan in the paper and the two meet up again. However Stan has an immediate effect on the quiet home life of Oliver and his wife.
I'm a big fan of Laurel and Hardy and have seen many good shorts of theirs. I have seen a few features and this is not one of their better efforts. It is not that the film isn't funny, but rather that it doesn't quite manage to be consistent over the whole running time. There are moments of genius but really the majority of the film revolves around a running gag about getting up thirteen flights of stairs. It all still works but there is the odd time where it is amusing without being as funny as you'd want it to be.
Laurel and Hardy do very well together and are inspired in some of their routines. They play their roles with real confidence and they manage to make even simple jokes be funnier by their delivery. The support cast are pretty unmemorable but still do their stuff as well as required personally, I'll take any amount of James Finlayson I can get, even if he's limited to `man on stairs'.
Overall this is not one of their best feature films as it does feel very stretched, but it does still have plenty of laughs and manages to get 60 minutes and many routines out of quite a simple plot.
I'm a big fan of Laurel and Hardy and have seen many good shorts of theirs. I have seen a few features and this is not one of their better efforts. It is not that the film isn't funny, but rather that it doesn't quite manage to be consistent over the whole running time. There are moments of genius but really the majority of the film revolves around a running gag about getting up thirteen flights of stairs. It all still works but there is the odd time where it is amusing without being as funny as you'd want it to be.
Laurel and Hardy do very well together and are inspired in some of their routines. They play their roles with real confidence and they manage to make even simple jokes be funnier by their delivery. The support cast are pretty unmemorable but still do their stuff as well as required personally, I'll take any amount of James Finlayson I can get, even if he's limited to `man on stairs'.
Overall this is not one of their best feature films as it does feel very stretched, but it does still have plenty of laughs and manages to get 60 minutes and many routines out of quite a simple plot.