Is there a more appropriate way to inaugurate a much-hankered weekend, than to slightly overindulge in a bag of chocolate as Laurel & Hardy, meanwhile, do their funny business in your very home, thanks to home video technology? As a child of ten or eleven years old, I would have barely cared to question the superiority of this pastime to almost anything else, at least as far as plain, uncomplicated coziness was concerned. My local video store had quite a few of the boys' titles for rent, and OUR RELATIONS may have been my favorite at the time. Part of the reason why just this film appealed so much to a youngster, was probably that it provides, literally, a non-stop feast of fast-paced, rather violent antics guaranteed to not make anyone sleepy; the mayhem is not hampered by the fact that we are here introduced to t-w-o sets of Laurel & Hardy's, as their quite identical twin brothers suddenly turn up in town. Whereas their next feature, WAY OUT WEST, would offer several sequences which, if compared to standard slapstick farce, come off as rather subtle, this tale of mistaken identity leans more towards the broad and blunt approach. Tender moments such as the boys doing an impromptu dance, as seen in the later film, are here absent.
However, it must be stressed that Laurel and Hardy are not being deprived of opportunity to develop more spontaneous, less frantic routines in this film. In the very first scene, we are introduced to our familiar Stan and Ollie having a (relatively) quiet breakfast with their wives, establishing to us viewers that the boys here, for once, seem to be (relatively) happily married. As the wives leave the room, Ollie suddenly receives a telegram from his mother, reporting that his and Stan's respective twin brothers, Bert and Alf, have been hanged due to involvement in a mutiny. Before these sad (though inaccurate, as it turns out) news are unveiled, an hilarious quiet routine develops, as Ollie orders Stan to clean his glasses, so he can read the telegram properly...and, expectedly, such a supremely simple foundation for a joke turns into one of the highlights of the film, which depends not so much on the material in itself, but instead on how it is executed by these two very distinct characters. Almost any pair of comedians could have thought of and performed the jokes in this scene; but few others than Stan and Ollie could have dared to let the effect of these jokes depend so seamlessly on their individual on-screen personalities. The routine does not merely give the boys opportunity to do funny stuff; the funny stuff in this opening sequence is used as an opportunity to truly define these gentlemen to us viewers, with Stan scratching his head in mystification as Ollie turns increasingly impatient (yet perhaps less so than is to be expected; he must, after all, be quite accustomed to Stan's notable sense of logic by this time).
The aforementioned routine, simple though it may seem, stands as one of my favorites with the boys. Even so, I'm surprised that it tends to disappear from my memory after each repeated viewing of the film. One explanation to this may be that the plot of this film is rather complex for a Laurel & Hardy-vehicle (or for a 73-minute-long comedy film in general), making a viewer more apt to recall the significant turning points in the story rather than stand-alone sequences. The two sets of Laurel and Hardys make the tale somewhat hard to follow at times, if one doesn't pay quite enough attention; especially so towards the end of the film, where even Stan and Ollie themselves, still unaware that their twin brothers are very much alive, mistake the other's brother for being his own pal. Wow, I get somewhat confused myself, just trying to write about this. However, it could be argued that a somewhat complicated plot was required for in order to do this kind of film; more simple, traditional Laurel & Hardy-predicaments would possibly not have justified, in the eyes of the public, the somewhat obvious device of serving the duo with a set of "doppelgangers." In any case, I find it quite fascinating how Laurel & Hardy, throughout their 13-year long stint as a team at Hal Roach's studio, made a point of often experimenting with their own concept; in an earlier film, the two-reeler BRATS, they were blessed with offspring completely identical to themselves, while in another short, TWICE TWO, they have taken the bold (?) step of marrying each other's strikingly similar, respective sisters! I guess it was just a matter of time before twin brothers had to be brought to the table, and the feature-length format does justice to the idea, whereas the plot of the aforementioned two-reelers would have come across as way too cartoonish for a journey of six reels.
In sum, though I've come to regard the more gentle WAY OUT WEST as perhaps my favorite feature of the boys in recent years, OUR RELATIONS still holds up as one of their better longer adventures; accolades should also be paid to James Finlayson, playing his usual, unforgettable villainous type ("I wouldn't say YES and I wouldn't say NO!"), as well as Alan Hale as the waiter and Arthur Housman as the "drunkard" (just try watching the scene in the telephone booth without laughing!). Though research will tell us that this film was not so literally a "Stan Laurel Production" as indicated in the opening credits, it is clear that the boys still had a great degree of creative control at this point.
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