Rent Laurel and Hardy: Vol.7: Block Heads (1938)
4.5 of 5 from 17 ratings
3h 14min
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
'Blockheads is one of the most popular Laurel & Hardy feature films. In World War One, Stan is left to guard a trench only to be discovered - still at his post - twenty years after the war! Ollie, now married, sees Stan's picture in the newspaper and, visiting his friend at the Old Soldiers' Home, invites him home for a meal ... from which point Ollie's peacetime existence seems more like another battlefield. Also included is L&H's very first talkie, 'Unaccustomed As We Are', a 1929 two-reeler from which Blockheads drew much of its inspiration. Another take on military life is presented in the early silent 'With Love and Hisses', while another classic silent, 'Should Married Men Go Home?', demonstrates once again how Mr. Laurel could disrupt the home life of Mr. and Mrs. Hardy!
Featuring:
- Blockheads (b/w)
- Blockheads (colourised)
- Unaccustomed (b/w)
- Unaccustomed (colourised)
- With Love and Hisses (b/w, Silent With Music Score)
- Should Married Men Go Home?- Actors:
- Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Patricia Ellis, Billy Gilbert, James Finlayson
- Directors:
- John G. Blystone
- Others:
- Marvin Hatley
- Studio:
- Universal Pictures
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy
- Collections:
- Cinema and the First World War, Cinema's Most Memorable Comedy Double Acts, Drama Films & TV, Films & TV by topic, Holidays Film Collection, The Cinema Paradiso Kissing Montage
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Reviews (2) of Laurel and Hardy: Vol.7: Block Heads
Classic Stan and Ollie. - Laurel and Hardy: Vol.7: Block Heads review by Steve
It is 1937, the Great War has been over for nearly 20 years, but Stan is still in his trench, unaware that everyone else has gone home. Away from his great pal for all that time, Ollie has made a reasonable life for himself. He has a wife. Admittedly Ollie is under her thumb, but they are very loving and they have a swell apartment in a swanky district.
It's a well ordered existence Mr. Hardy has... until Stan returns from the front. And then inside two hours, Ollie has been in a fight with James Finlayson, has his big game hunter neighbour's blonde wife locked in a trunk, while his own has turned into a dragon, and the kitchen is in flames. The duo are chased out of the building on the end of an elephant gun. And the great joke of Block-Heads is, would they really have been better off apart!?
Are they fated to be destroyed by their association with each other? Well, for over a decade in their films, Stan and Ollie have always been just about to get everything right, when everything goes disastrously wrong. It just took a lot longer this time.
This is a very simply plotted film. For a lot of the running time, they are just trying to get up the stairs to the thirteenth floor. When they meet at the soldier's refuge, Ollie thinks Stan has lost a leg in the war, and he is so tenderly solicitous that he carries Stan in his arms. When he finds out that Stan is intact (Why didn't you tell me you had two legs?) he drops him in a heap. It's absolutely all or nothing. Not necessarily their funniest, but a very interesting part of the canon, as ever made special by the brilliant actors and their immortal alter egos.
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Very funny and un-pc late Laurel and Hardy film - Laurel and Hardy: Vol.7: Block Heads review by PV
I enjoyed so much of this - some great visual gags. Suspend disbelief and enjoy!
Un-pc on SO many levels and all the better for it (maybe not re the elephant tusks and hunter).
People these days need to grow up and realise comedy ALWAYS has victims - laughing at people is not immoral. it is comedy. Not necessarily nasty either.
The jokes there re the wheelchair and on leg are hilarious. No doubt people will call out sexism and misogyny too,. No black people so no racism...
Maybe not the best of their films (i loved A CHUMP AT OXFORD from 1940). But classic and better than any TV or film comedy now.
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