The Big Noise has often been referred to as Laurel and Hardy's worst movie. Randy Dreyfuss and Michael Medved included this in their book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, it is the only Laurel and Hardy movie to get a BOMB in Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide and William K. Everson was especially harsh on the movie in his book, The Complete Films of Laurel and Hardy. Yet I find each time I watch this movie I thoroughly enjoy it and laugh quite a bit.
This was the boys' fifth feature for Fox. Their films for Fox have a terrible reputation from Laurel and Hardy fans (though I personally have a fondness for them which I wrote about here). Much of this is due to the working conditions there and the lack of creative freedom the boys had. When they worked at Hal Roach Studios they were a major part of the creative force behind their films. Yet when they were at Fox they were simply actors, who did what they were told. This is something that becomes very clear when you look at the first three movies the boys made for Fox (Great Guns (1941), A Haunting We Will Go (1942) and Jitterbugs (1943)). Regardless of whether or not you like these films (I like them), they feel quite different from any of the pictures they made for Roach. Stan and Ollie feel out of character sometimes, the humor is quite different and the boys aren't always the focus of the movies. However with the fourth film The Dancing Masters (1943), something was changing. The boys become the focus of these movies, they much closer resembled the characters they had played at Roach and the humor was much closer to the earlier Laurel and Hardy. What I find interesting about The Big Noise's reputation is that this movie much more closely resembles that of classic Laurel and Hardy then the first three Fox films. With this in mind, it would seem more likely that this would be held in a higher regard than some of the Fox movies that preceded it. Yet that is not the case.
The reason that the comedy of this movie feels so much like the Hal Roach films is simple. Much of is taken directly from those earlier pictures. Gags from Habeus Corpus (1928), Wrong Again (1928), Oliver the Eighth (1933), Berth Marks (1929), Block Heads (1938) are reused here. While some might complain about this, I have no problem with it. A funny gag is still a funny gag and many of these gags are still quite funny here. I know this might sound sacrilegious to some but I actually find the train berth scene here funnier than the one in Berth Marks. Much of this is due to a great addition of Jack Norton as a drunk, who finds his way into Stan and Ollie's berth. The results are very funny. However not all the funny moments come from the older pictures. The bomb testing scene and the ending are quite funny and original to this movie. This is not to say every joke works but a great majority of them do. While there are some straight scenes that don't include Stan and Ollie, there are much less than the Roach features, Bonnie Scotland (1935) and Swiss Miss (1938).
Is this as great as Way Out West (1937) or The Music Box (1932)? No. Is it very entertaining and quite funny? Yes.
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