Laurel & Hardy in WHY GIRLS LOVE SAILORS (1927) – Stan in drag is a bit of a drag

Why Girls Love Sailors was a lost Laurel and Hardy film in the U.S. for many years, until a California fan obtained a copy in 1986. While any reclaimed L&H film is good news, it’s a pity it had to be this one instead of, say, Hats Off.

This is another of those early Pathe numbers that, even when it gets Laurel and Hardy together in a scene, it hardly knows what to do with them. Here, Hardy is the brusque first mate of a typically maladorous sea captain, who shanghaies Laurel’s girlfriend(!!) (Viola Richard), causing Laurel to go to very mechanical lengths to rescue her.

Laurel has the lion’s share of footage here, most of it not very good. The funniest scene occurs early on, when he is courting Richard unbeknownst to the captain. He steals a kiss from her and is so overcome with triumph, he falls over furniture and rolls around on the bed like a little kid. Laurel’s reaction here seems about halfway between Harry Langdon and the later Stanley, and it offers a promise of great comedy, a promise that is pretty much reneged upon for the rest of the movie.

When L&H finally appear together in the movie, it’s because Laurel has dressed up as a woman in a far-too-elaborate scheme to vamp the ship’s crew and cause Hardy to mistakenly throw each of them overboard. There sure is a lot of turnover in these seaboats’ crews, isn’t there?

This movie also marks Anita Garvin’s first appearance in an L&H movie, though she doesn’t show up until close to movie’s end and hardly has a chance to show what an excellent foil she could be.

Strange that, according to film history, Laurel was into directing and reluctant to return to the front of a movie camera. Why Girls Love Sailors seems to prove he’d do everything he could to hog the footage. Thankfully for film history, things would balance out just a few short films later.

LOST AND FOUNDRY (1937) – Damn, Swee’pea, enough already!

Popeye is on a lunch break outside the factory where he works. Olive, with baby Swee’Pea in tow, happens by and sits with Popeye. Time to place bets on how long before the pair get distracted and Swee’Pea does his crawling-within-an-inch-of-my-life routine from his debut cartoon, Little Swee’Pea (1936). (Quite a factory, too — it looks like a cross between Charlie Chaplin’s joint in Modern Times and the nasty club initiation in Popeye’s Can You Take It?).

As with the earlier Swee’Pea cartoon, the saving-Swee’Pea ritual is enlivened by the Fleischers’ astounding perspective work and on-the-nose pacing. In the end, Swee’Pea downs some spinach and actually ends up saving Popeye and Olive, and he even gets to do the closing theme as a reward for his (!) trouble.

On a rating scale of 1 to 4 spinach cans, I give this cartoon: 

MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL (1975) – See it in spite of its rave reviews

(As a lead-up to Monty Python’s final concert performance on July 20, each day prior to that, I will post a review of a Monty Python movie. Today, the Holy Grail of them all.)

Eddie Murphy once did a great routine about how some of his fans mangled his best jokes in their re-tellings. Monty Python and the Holy Grail has the same effect on people. When you read reviews of this movie, people tend to not critique the movie so much as re-quote its punchlines, as though they hope the movie’s wit will rub off on them.

Suffice to say that Monty Python and the Holy Grail is one of the great sacred-cow killers of all time (literally, in one of the movie’s gags), on a level with The Marx Brothers’ classic Duck Soup. And when Pythoner Terry Gilliam (at least I think it’s him) plays soldiers’ heads as a xylophone in exactly the same manner as Harpo Marx did in Duck Soup, you realize that the torch has been passed from one comedic generation to another.

One wouldn’t have thought that the King Arthur legend was ripe for spoofing, but this movie gets the job done admirably. The movie begins with credits that can’t even agree with themselves, so you know the movie’s sense of history is going to be screwed up. Sure enough, it presents King Arthur as a man who can’t command a modicum of respect from even the lowliest peasant (who, in one scene, argues with Arthur about the virtues of socialism).

Plot? We don’t need no stinkin’ plot! The movie is mostly an excuse for hilarious wordplay, outrageous Marx Bros.-like musical numbers, Terry Gilliam’s inspired animation, and Python’s pointed pointlessness (what a cop-out ending!). It also has an outrageous amount of gore for a comedy, which turns out to be part of its point: Macho knights aren’t quite so romantic when they’re hacking apart real flesh and blood.

Satire is now a cottage industry in movie comedies, and the movie year of 1975 probably had a lot to do with it: that was the year of Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein, Woody Allen’s Love and Death, and this Monty Python entry. But at least satirists aimed high then. Nowadays, the pedestrian antics of a spoof like Scary Movie would themselves be ripe for Python picking.