TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Inadvands Boring, over-political, tech fuzed mess

Bergorks If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Bea Swanson This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

tavm Like their previous feature-Pack Up Your Troubles, this one has Laurel & Hardy in a World War I setting, only here while Ollie has gone back to a normal life, Stan is left still guarding his post 20 years after it ended! In the present time, Ollie has been married for a year to the day so he has an hour to go out. That's when he discovers Stan back from his duty at the soldiers home when someone shows his picture in the paper. I'll stop there and just say this was another of their hilarious movies from the late '30s complete with some of their regular supporting cast of James Finlayson and Billy Gilbert as well as some newbies like Minna Gombell and Patricia Ellis, who I just watched in Romance on the Run. I also liked Marvin Hatley's score as I always like his music in the other L & H pictures. So on that note, I highly recommend Block-Heads. P.S. This was Hal Roach's last film under his M-G-M contract before switching to United Artists afterward. He sold his Our Gang shorts series to his former distributor beforehand so this turned out to be one of those players-Tommy Bond's-last appearance for his former boss as he'd join the rest of the gang at his new Culver City neighbor. Also, if you'd read Randy Skretvedt's book, "Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies", you probably know about Stan's original ending and his boss Roach vetoing it. Personally, I think I liked Hal's better.

ccthemovieman-1 This is the "boys" - Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy - it what many consider their last good comedy feature film, doing what they do best: short slapstick routines. It's almost a compilation of them, a series of routines more than a story with a plot. Stan and Ollie, between 45 and 50 years old when they made this film, were Hollywood veterans by now.Frankly, the comedy might be considered a little too corny for today's crowd but, hey, the movie is 70 years old. If you're a fan of these two comedians you should enjoy this film. Anyway, when anyone provides a lot of gags in just under one hour, you'll hit and miss a lot....but some things will always be funny. Some are still clever, too, such as the bit with the window shade being a shadow.You can always count on Ollie being henpecked and Stan being an airhead (he's a WWI soldier who marched in a trench for 20 years not realizing the war is long over). Of course, if you think about it, that premise has more holes in it than the proverbial swiss cheese, but who cares? A good portion of this film involves the simple fact of Ollie and Stan just trying to walk 13 flights up the stairs to Ollie's apartment, and the adventures that happen to them along the way.After watching just 57 minutes of these guys pratfalls and slapstick routines, you'll be exhausted!

bkoganbing Do you have the feeling that the folks in the army deliberately forgot to tell Stan that World War I was over? Maybe they just didn't want the troop ship to sink on the way back from France.If that was the case Ollie made the mistake of his life when he decided to invite his long lost buddy Stan over to meet the wife and have a good home cooked meal. Ollie's happily married now to Minna Gombell and when we first meet them he seems to be one happy well adjusted man.Blockheads really starts when Stan is reunited with Ollie at the old soldier's home. I guess a grateful government is giving Stan free room and board for being the last man discharged from World War I. Still there's nothing like home cooking.I think Blockheads offers us the proposition that Ollie can be a well adjusted if somewhat fatuous individual by himself. It's only apparently when he interacts with Stan that things just seem to happen.And in fact that's what Blockheads is, a series of gags from the time that Ollie meets Stan at the home and just assumes he's an amputee because he's decided to sit a wheelchair rigged up for one. Right up to the point where big game hunter Billy Gilbert, the Hardy's next door neighbor chases the both of them out of the house because he catches Mrs. Gilbert in Ollie's pajamas. How she got in them? You have to see Blockheads to find out.Best gag I thought was Stan dealing with an obnoxious neighbor who has just bullied Ollie into fetching the neighbor kid's football. Very priceless bit of comeuppance. To see how in the space of an hour Laurel manages to literally become a home wrecker, catch Blockheads.

southbase Producer Hal Roach was reportedly disturbed at the increasingly bizarre endings Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy proposed for their MGM-released features of the mid/late-30s but the comedic results here more than warrant it. The feature begins making you think it will be merely a spoof of a slightly-musty WWI 'returning veteran' melodrama, then enters a strange, deceptive 'midground' number of scenes where the two are supposedly happily reunited yet must almost literally battle each other in an undercurrent of mindslips, oddball personas, switched anonymity, and a willfully ignorant understanding of lethal technology (Stan attempts to back up a loaded dump truck to help Ollie leave a parking space and instead spills a ton of dirt and refuse right on Ollie's head. The results aren't much better when Ollie--unexplainedly--soon allows him to drive the car into his home parking garage.) The film's mise en scene finally settles at the resplendent, multi-leveled apartment complex where Ollie tries to get his previously sweet and accommodating wife to fix a steak "this thick" (Ollie holds his fingers apart several inches to indicate the due process and wealth both men are implicitly entitled to) for them. But once Ollie inadvertently destroys the complex's only elevator and the two begin to create total havoc not only with several other residents but with Oliver's own wife the film is a textbook example of brilliantly refined movie comedic targeting: sweetly gentle optical fades from debris-ridden visual punch lines, well-timed and properly attenuated sound effects (the 'hiss' from Oliver's kitchen gas stove when Stan dimly attempts to try to light it is particularly dangerous sounding), public revealment of the often unglamorous politics of marriage and neighborliness, supposedly innocent bystanders turned cheerleaders of outright societal collapse and hungry for more (this IMDBer was on the floor by the time a totally innocent married woman from across the hall had been stripped of her normal clothes & wearing Ollie's pajamas had to escape her own husband by masquerading as a chair while Stan kept trying to sit on her.) Say what you will about the increasingly poisonous business relationship between Stan and Hal Roach, the film is polished looking, employs several old timers from their silent years, and I found the portrayal of the women understanding and believable, not as quaint (Marx Brothers) or bellicose (W.C. Fields) as some of the competing comedy works of that era. Hadn't seen this one in years but it proves the boys were capable of many more years of contribution with the right administrative and technical support.