Watch full movies online with The Stu View
We present for your viewing pleasure Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in their 1939 feature The Flying Deuces, in the first of what will hopefully be a fairly regular series of film showings and retrospective reviews here at The Stu View.
Legal Stuff - all of the films that will be available to view here are now in the public domain and hence have no copyright owners. That means these movies are freely available to the viewing public.
I've written a little retrospective look at The Flying Deuces below but I'm sure most of you will want to watch the movie first...
The Flying Deuces (1939)
Starring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson, Charles Middleton
The Flying Deuces has the distinction of being the first Laurel and Hardy feature that was not made at Hal Roach Studios, instead being produced by RKO. Aficionados of Stan and Ollie know that the boys did not have a good time when they worked for the major studios in the 1940s but Flying Deuces is a nice little movie that holds up well against their Roach produced output. It is obvious that Stan Laurel still had major creative input here - something that was ludicrously taken away from him by the big studios during those 40s dark days.
Despite not being one of their classics, The Flying Deuces has a number of memorable sequences and bits of inspired dialogue, such as the following line from Stan when discussing reincarnation with Ollie:
"Oh, I'd like to come back as myself. I always got along swell with me."
Stan playing Waiting for the Sunrise using bed springs as a harp and Ollie singing Shine on Harvest Moon while Stan does a soft-shoe shuffle are the two stand-out moments for me.
The quality of this Laurel and Hardy film, despite not being made by Hal Roach, shows just how much better their 1940s movies would have been had the big studios understood what Stan and Ollie's comedy was all about and had given them creative control instead of just dictating scripts and weak gags to them.
20th Century Fox and MGM - shame on you!
Laurel & Hardy 21 Disc DVD Box Set
Laurel & Hardy Sons of the Desert
Laurel & Hardy The Flying Deuces
No comments:
Post a Comment