(WARNING: Major spoilers abound!)
Just as the silent-film Laurel & Hardy went through fits and starts before becoming a bonafide team, so the team’s early “talkies” went through an uneven stage. Judging from the staginess of Unaccustomed as We Are (their first talkie, which explains the movie’s title), one would never guess they would so quickly adjust to sound in their second and third talkies (Men ‘o War and Perfect Day), only to slip back again with They Go Boom .
The movie’s premise has been worn thin by decades of unimaginative sitcom copies of it. Ollie brings Stan home for dinner, leading Stan to believe that he’ll get a hero’s welcome, only to have Mrs. Hardy (Mae Busch in full shrew mode) complain about having to fix dinner for another of Ollie’s friends. Through labored circumstances, the woman across the hall (Thelma Todd) tries to help Ollie, only to get accidentally undressed via Stan and Ollie’s blundering, paving the way for a confrontation with the woman’s irate husband, a cop (Edgar Kennedy).
L&H buffs well know that their later movie Block-Heads (1938) was a feature-length reworking of this situation, but despite the feature’s extra length, the situation plays better nine years later. Here, the stagy “talkie” atmosphere lays bare the story’s contrivances. Some of the individual gags are cute, especially those that play with the movies’ newfound sound (as when Mrs. Hardy argues with Ollie to the rhythm of the music playing from a phonograph). But the fitful nature of the movie emphasizes the dud gags as well as the funny ones.
The best thing one can say about the movie is that it showed Laurel & Hardy adjusting to sound far better than some of their peers. Much of this nit-picking comes from hindsight; in 1929, nearly any movie with sound was a hit. But even Laurel & Hardy themselves could and would do much better in the near future.
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