Great Guns takes us back to war days, a period when people were having to tighten their belts because times were hard. The great comedy drought of '41 saw jokes in movies placed on a ration of just one per 75 minutes. Unfortunately Great Guns lasts for 74.
Notwithstanding the brief step away to RKO in 1939 with The Flying Deuces, this was the first of the duo's nine post-Roach movies. To be fair, while most of them are wretched, this one isn't so awful, despite the almost total absence of anything approaching a gag. While Laurel and Hardy had begun to decline since hitting an-all time peak in 1937 (Way Out West), this was still only four years on, and just a year after the reasonably amusing A Chump At Oxford. So it is that, despite having no back-up on the writing front and being acted off the screen by a crow, they still manage to find some last residual laughs in the tank.
Highlight has to be the parade line-up where they order the General to take their photo. Ollie's cry to Stan of "Give it a little dignity" briefly recalls some of the glory days, as does Stan's earlier self-parodying [We haven't eaten for three days] "Yesterday, today and tomorrow." In the main, though, Stan and Ollie were living on reputation alone. The guest cast (the leads of which are picked because they're photogenic, and virtually none of them display comic timing) react against L & H as if they're a couple of bozos, but not because the duo are acting in any way strange. Even just being glanced standing perfectly normally in a line-up will produce outrage and some cranked-up incidental music to cement the gag.
Yes, Stan and Ollie are rarely seen doing anything genuinely funny in a film past 1940, but we're led to believe they are by goodwill and past knowledge alone. Yet what if someone had never seen a Laurel and Hardy film before this? Surely it would fall down as two averagely amusing men lark about in third-rate vignettes joined together in an approximation of narrative? If this was the first Laurel and Hardy film you'd seen you'd never know what the fuss was about, something lost on Fox who promote their Stan & Ollie output on home video with a trailer announcing "four of their best-loved movies". Isn't that against the Trades Descriptions Act?
The humour is sometimes a little unsettling, too. When a Sergeant has his face blackened in an explosion, Stan and Ollie pretend not to recognise him, Stan suggesting "Look, they've assigned us a porter." Much 'hilarity' ensues, after which the General demands, "what are you trying to do, put on a Minstrel show?" For their 20s and 30s output it was a naïve gesture, a world away. But this is far too close to home not to be uncomfortable nowadays, particularly as the 'joke' comes not from Stan's ignorance but from cognisant racial mockery. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, just as 99% of the jokes about the boys seem to be solely related to how thick they are. ("Maybe they'll put me in the Intelligence Corps." "Brother, you're with him, right now.")
Thankfully, as poor as this is (and there's a reason that a crow down your underpants never became a comedy staple) Stan and Ollie are the more-or-less the focus all the way through, rather than playing support in their own movie. Jokes like Ollie checking the time and spilling his drink down his shirt seem old now, but were possibly reasonably new then (and still considered good enough to be homaged 43 years later in The Young Ones). Having said that, the film drags on lifelessly for the whole second half, so the best that can possibly be said is that it's bearable.
Notwithstanding the brief step away to RKO in 1939 with The Flying Deuces, this was the first of the duo's nine post-Roach movies. To be fair, while most of them are wretched, this one isn't so awful, despite the almost total absence of anything approaching a gag. While Laurel and Hardy had begun to decline since hitting an-all time peak in 1937 (Way Out West), this was still only four years on, and just a year after the reasonably amusing A Chump At Oxford. So it is that, despite having no back-up on the writing front and being acted off the screen by a crow, they still manage to find some last residual laughs in the tank.
Highlight has to be the parade line-up where they order the General to take their photo. Ollie's cry to Stan of "Give it a little dignity" briefly recalls some of the glory days, as does Stan's earlier self-parodying [We haven't eaten for three days] "Yesterday, today and tomorrow." In the main, though, Stan and Ollie were living on reputation alone. The guest cast (the leads of which are picked because they're photogenic, and virtually none of them display comic timing) react against L & H as if they're a couple of bozos, but not because the duo are acting in any way strange. Even just being glanced standing perfectly normally in a line-up will produce outrage and some cranked-up incidental music to cement the gag.
Yes, Stan and Ollie are rarely seen doing anything genuinely funny in a film past 1940, but we're led to believe they are by goodwill and past knowledge alone. Yet what if someone had never seen a Laurel and Hardy film before this? Surely it would fall down as two averagely amusing men lark about in third-rate vignettes joined together in an approximation of narrative? If this was the first Laurel and Hardy film you'd seen you'd never know what the fuss was about, something lost on Fox who promote their Stan & Ollie output on home video with a trailer announcing "four of their best-loved movies". Isn't that against the Trades Descriptions Act?
The humour is sometimes a little unsettling, too. When a Sergeant has his face blackened in an explosion, Stan and Ollie pretend not to recognise him, Stan suggesting "Look, they've assigned us a porter." Much 'hilarity' ensues, after which the General demands, "what are you trying to do, put on a Minstrel show?" For their 20s and 30s output it was a naïve gesture, a world away. But this is far too close to home not to be uncomfortable nowadays, particularly as the 'joke' comes not from Stan's ignorance but from cognisant racial mockery. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, just as 99% of the jokes about the boys seem to be solely related to how thick they are. ("Maybe they'll put me in the Intelligence Corps." "Brother, you're with him, right now.")
Thankfully, as poor as this is (and there's a reason that a crow down your underpants never became a comedy staple) Stan and Ollie are the more-or-less the focus all the way through, rather than playing support in their own movie. Jokes like Ollie checking the time and spilling his drink down his shirt seem old now, but were possibly reasonably new then (and still considered good enough to be homaged 43 years later in The Young Ones). Having said that, the film drags on lifelessly for the whole second half, so the best that can possibly be said is that it's bearable.