Way Out West

I must be out of step on this one, as everyone seems to acclaim this as Laurel & Hardy's best film. OK it has it's amusing moments, but one is left with the feeling that it went on for too long and that if you squeeze an orange to excess, you are just left with the pips. The only memorable scene for me was the duo's performance in the saloon of 'The Trail of the Lonesome Pine' Wasn't it Stan Laurel that said he preferred the short films they made? I think he was right, ('The Music Box' was certainly proof of that). The only exception to this rule perhaps was 'Blockheads', which was a funnier film than this. So for Laurel & Hardy at their best I will be sticking to the shorts!

Everyone knows what sorts of things Laurel and Hardy do, and now their in the old west (uh oh!). The two men are given the duty of delivering a deed to Mary Roberts (Rosina Lawrence), but bartender Mickey Finn (James Finlayson) tricks them into giving him the deed. From there, it's up to Stan and Ollie to get the deed back to its rightful owner. Which of course means that they're falling all over each other. One gets the feeling that these guys were sort of an inspiration for Gilligan and the Skipper. You'll never forget the hat scene, or Laurel's thumb, or the whole sequence where they try to break into the house. "Way Out West" is a comedy classic!

Laurel & Hardy travel out west to Brushwood Gulch to keep a promise to an old prospector . On his death they must take a locket and the deeds to a valuable goldmine to his daughter. When they arrive at the saloon where she works, the saloon owner sees a chance to get rich and gets one of his dancers to pretend to be the daughter, Mary. When they discover their mistake the pair try to get the deeds back but are driven out of town. They plan to return that night and rob the safe of the deeds and return them to Mary. I have been watching plenty of Laurel & Hardy shorts recently but it's been many years since I saw anything longer from them, so it was with great joy I saw this in the TV schedule and settled down to watch it. My first observation as a short watcher is that it is surprisingly close to the consistency of the shorts, even if it is over three times longer than those. The plot is detailed enough to provide several really good routines but also plenty of really enjoyable gags. Of great enjoyment to a fan of the shorts were several comic scenes that showed them to be more than just funny men. The soft shoe shuffle is the oft-quoted favourite and is quite amusing but the songs are all enjoyable without intruding on the comedy in the way some films of the time did. The most pleasurable aspect is Hardy's voice – he is a charming baritone and is really surprising. Laurel is good too and the pair are cool on `Trail of the Lonesome Pine'. Both Laurel & Hardy's delivery is impeccable and the routines and gags are only made better by their talent. Finalyson is excellent and for me is easily the king of that double take/squint thing that he does so very well! Lynn and Lawrence are both OK but are really secondary characters behind the men. Overall fans will rightly love this film and it may also win over some who have yet to experience the pair. It has music, dance, routines and gags – all delivered by the great duo themselves. What more do you need?

The perfect scores here are astounding. The reviewers must be oblivious to what made Laurel and Hardy great, or else they are so besotted with L&H that they give them a 10 just for showing up, like opera fans do for divas past their prime. This may be the best "feature length" L&H, but that's not saying much. As other reviewers have pointed out -- and been voted down for their perception -- feature-length -- even short feature-length like this -- is too long for L&H. L&H did short subjects, extended jokes, not the overproduced shaggy-dog stories of the feature- length era. MGM had done the distribution from the 20s, but I think they had a hand in replacing the shorts with the feature-length in the mid-30s. We get a hint of trouble already at the start of the opening credits. Instead of L&H's trademark Cuckoo Song, with screechy clarinets -- primitive notes in keeping with the antics of the shorts -- we get boilerplate orchestration, which continues relentlessly and intrusively throughout the movie, smothering the charm of the interplay between Laurel and Hardy. We don't see L&H for the first 6 minutes, instead we get a stock dance-hall scene with hoochy-koochy girls and carousing cowboys, serving only as padding. This kind of waste goes on and on. As for the songs, etc. L&H are not a song & dance act, as MGM made them in many of the feature-lengths. Which is to say, more padding. I was looking forward to seeing a feature-length L&H. After all, if 20 minutes is great, then imagine over an hour! Alas, I discovered that comedy wasn't added, just the runtime. Film historians, critics and Hal Roach himself agree that L&H's decline began when the MGM-labeled feature-lengths replaced the shorts. They're right.

This is truly one of the funniest movies ever made. I'll never look at another block and tackle without a chuckle. And of course that groovy soft shoe shuffle and the Trail of the Lonesome Pine are gems - cinema history. Stan and Ollie weren't just slapstick geniuses. Theirs was a subtle blend of visual, acute observational and surreal comedy that has rarely been matched and never beaten. This film exemplifies their craft perfectly and shows touches of where, twenty to forty years later, the Goons, Monty Python, Tommy Cooper and The Comic Strip were coming from. After seeing this I recommend Sons of The Dessert, their other feature length masterpiece.

Being someone who usually laughs at the antics of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, the most amazing thing about this movie was that it was just great.....until the two stars showed up! I couldn't believe it. They actually slowed the movie down. Well, you can't win 'em all. The opening five minutes was really terrific, featuring wild scenes in a saloon. "Wild" as in a shootout scene and wild as in wild women. Those female singers and dancers were beautiful. The woman who played the female lead in the film, Sharon Lynn ("Lola") really captured my eye. But once the boys appeared, the comedy actually slowed down and after over a half hour of almost no laughs, I almost canned it, but it picked up in the second half and we even saw Stan and OIlie do a little "soft shoe," but I got this for the comedy, not dancing. Humor is in the eye of the beholder and I sure am in the minority here on this movie, but I didn't find this one of L&H's "funniest" films at all. To me, there was far more drama and music than comedy in here. The old-time comics, with the exception of Groucho Mark, were best doing slapstick. Sorry, but this movie was not as good as advertised. It just wasn't very funny.

A personal note before reviewing this movie proper: I first watched this as a kid in 1979 at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library (a building which was torn down last year to be replaced by another one with the same name) when the place showed old movies every Saturday. I only saw part of it then but what I saw was pretty funny. Then I saw it again, weeks later, at the same place-this time the entirety of it-and it was really funny! This was my first viewing of a Laurel & Hardy film. The thin English one and the heavyset one from Harlem, Georgia were hilarious to watch for me at the time so as a result, they became my favorite comedians to this day. Their arrival in a western town is to deliver a deed-from her late father-to a woman named Mary Roberts (Rosina Lawrence). But since they've never seen her before, Mickey Finn (L & H regular James Finlayson) passes his wife, saloon singer Lola Marcel (Sharon Lynne) as her. I'll stop there and just say after rewatching this on YouTube, this is still quite a hilarious outing for the boys whether, among other things between them, getting chased by the Finns or doing their dance to a tune by The Avalon Boys or even when they're singing and Stan suddenly changes voices mid-song! This was funny mostly from beginning to end. So on that note, I highly recommend Way Out West.

The basic premise of WAY OUT WEST is having the two boys (Ollie and Stan) attempt to deliver the deed to a goldmine to the rightful owner whose guardians are scheming to get it for themselves. Getting it into the hands of the proper person turns out to be the raison d'etre for the whole hilarious saga with the sort of sight gags the duo are famous for. The musical interludes, aside from the soft shoe number, includes a nice rendition of "Trail of the Lonesome Pine"--but the interludes are widely separated by the slapstick routines that are as inventive as they are funny. Particularly amusing is the sequence using a donkey to hoist Ollie to a balcony--with astonishing results. Stan Laurel does a ticklish scene with his laughter seeming like the real thing for an extensive bout with the lady trying to get the deed away from him. This sort of thing is sometimes carried to lengthy extremes but it still manages to be funny. Not my favorite of the team's work--it seems more like an extended short than a full-length feature but it does provide some solid laughs.

I've always really liked Laurel & Hardy, but WAY OUT WEST just isn't one of my favorites from the comedy duo. Comedy is surely a subjective thing, and this felt a little lacking in the laughs department for me. I didn't really see the need to make this feature a "western" story either, as the same tale could have functioned pretty much the same way in any other element. My favorite L&H feature is definitely still SONS OF THE DESERT, followed by BLOCK-HEADS. It's cute to see Stan and Ollie dancing the old soft shoe together, and Oliver Hardy always had a very nice singing voice. But to tell you the truth, I'm not here to watch the boys sing and dance. My favorite and most laugh-out-loud sequence would be when the always-dependable James Finlayson "kicks the bucket"! Very funny bit there.

THE MOVIE COMBINES FARCE,COMIC SINGING and DRAMA IN A UNIQUE and MEMORABLE WAY,with some of the funniest sight gags ever LAUREL AND HARDY are on top form and the support from James Finlayson is an indispensable ingredient.The neck-stretching special effect is unforgettable