Review of Beau Hunks (1931) by William W — 25 Feb 2011

Goes after its subject with a surprisingly straight face. A stern CO plays his part with exactly the same tremulous rage and melodrama you'd have probably got in a straight drama of the time; the scenes of marching in the desert - complete with convincing-looking sandstorm - are shot as though verite-style; and the overtones of life and death (it's the only L&H short I'm aware of where supporting characters actually perish) rather takes the edge off the funny, although its unit of shoeless, Allah-praising Riffs - undone, finally, by a barrelful of tacks - suggests an entirely innocent, Bash Street-level view of international conflict.

Anyone who thought these things were solely concerned with finding new ways to set a fat man to falling over (and his cohort to impotent tears) should study the opening barrage of verbal gags involving "levity" and "synonym", or Stan's definition of a dromedary as "a thing that eats dates" - though, in one still-astonishing stunt, Ollie is propelled across his own parlour by a butt-mounted spring, landing atop the flowers on the piano at which he's just been singing his lovestruck heart out: the destruction, in this instance, providing as eloquent an image of crushed hopes as these shorts ever arrived at.