80. Sons Of The Desert (1933)

Directed By William A. Seiter

Synopsis

Laurel and Hardy want to go to a convention of their Freemasonry like society "The Sons Of The Desert". Hardy pretends to have a nervous breakdown and the doctor advises him to go to Honolulu, they go to the convention instead. Wives find out.

Review

I've never been a fan of Laurel and Hardy, in fact almost all my ideas of it come from a crappy animated series that used to play in the morning in Portugal, when there were only 2 TV channels and channel 2 was probably playing Mass or Agricultural Bulletins for farmers to use the right pesticides... or Soviet Bloc cartoons in this show by a guy called Vasco Granja which people of my generation tuned into each week in the vain hope of getting something slightly exciting instead of animated newspapers waiting in a breadline while an animated dog made out of matches represented the evils of capitalism.

So, with that out of my system, I quite enjoyed the film. The animated series was almost certainly sanitised and Sons of The Desert has its amount of violence, alcohol, smoking and near-tits. Of course many of the jokes are dated, but it still managed to elicit a couple of laughs from me and my girlfriend and it was a generally nice experience to watch.

Actually, pretty surprisingly I enjoyed this film a lot more than Duck Soup, for example. At least Laurel and Hardy aren't constantly trying to make racy jokes which simply don't work today. Sons Of The Desert is what we call today "cringe" humour, a bit like the Office or Marion and Geoff and so on, you are looking at it thinking "No... ohh... shit is going to happen, and these people are so sad". The humour comes from the fact that fortunately you are not as sad as these people and you can therefore laugh at them. Laurel and Hardy are dumb, self-deluded and live as the abused in an abusive relationship with their powerful wives, and most of the humour derives from that. Good film, buy it at Amazon UK or US. Koniek

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Throughout Laurel and Hardy's career, the driving force behind the team was Laurel, who wrote the scripts and frequently produced (and sometimes directed) the films, and always insisted on being paid twice as much as Hardy.

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