Saps At Sea (1940)

There are many Laurel & Hardy fans around the world, and rightly so. The two stand tall as one of the best comedy duos of all time. And I have barely scraped the surface of their filmography, despite treating myself to a nice boxset of their work some years ago. There are two reasons for that. First of all, so far, I don't love them quite as much as the other stars from that era (Chaplin, Keaton, and Harold Lloyd got to me first, and Abbott & Costello delivered verbal routines I am still impressed and amused by to this day). Second, they're not the easiest films to discuss and review. The plots are often very slight, and fans of the stars will already know much more about their work than I do.

As is so often the way, Stan and Ollie play, well, Stan and Ollie, this time around trying to keep themselves employed in a horn factory. Unfortunately, there's one horn that tends to drive workers into a nervous breakdown when it is tested too often, and this happens to Ollie, leading to a doctor ordering him to have a break. The two men treat themselves to some time on a small boat, but the peace is ruined by the presence of an escaped criminal.

Fans of the magnificent, and superior, Modern Times may already get the feeling that this is wandering through similar territory, and that's quite correct. That's not to say that one film was aiming to copy the other, however. It's just that factory roles made up a large part of the employment sector at that time. It's the same way now, although I hope that most people can work in slightly safer conditions, and watching films from this time can serve as a depressing reminder of how little progress we have really made when it comes to forcing workers to keep up with the optimum output of various machinery and automated processes.

With a quartet of reliable writers having worked on the screenplay, as well as input from our leads (of course), director Gordon Douglas, who did a lot of work with the "Little Rascals" before helming only a couple of Laurel & Hardy films, knows that he can generally sit back and relax while his stars make the material shine, and that's exactly what happens. Douglas doesn't do a bad job, and I don't want to minimise his contribution here, but a Laurel & Hardy movie rests on how often Laurel & Hardy create the laughs. This 56-minute feature has a very healthy gag rate.

As for the cast, Richard Cramer is suitably menacing as the dangerous escapee, Ben Turpin is good fun as a cross-eyed handyman, there's a goat added to the small ship's "crew" to add to the fun, and our leads are (as expected) effortlessly brilliant throughout. 

This is great fun for fans of the leads, but also could serve as a nice introduction for anyone who has yet to explore the rest of their filmography. I am not sure how it is viewed by those who are already familiar with the entire Laurel & Hardy filmography, but I thought this was pretty great.

8/10

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