Not So Fine Messes: The 1940s Films of Laurel and Hardy (Part 4)

This piece is serialized into several parts. In case you found this page by chance, the article begins here.

Their next picture, The Big Noise (1944), has had a bad reputation for decades, helped in part by the Medved book cited previously. Although the film is more leisurely paced than their previous effort, this is nonetheless a very entertaining, imaginative comedy mixing wartime effort with science fiction.

Arthur Space plays Alva P. Hartley, an ambitious, though bumbling widowed inventor whose previous incarnations include a motorized toothbrush, an automated cigar dispenser and a grapefruit mask (?!?). For the war effort, he has just created a bomb, and requires some detectives to keep an eye on it before he takes it to the patent office in Washington. Stan and Ollie are janitors cleaning a detective agency when Hartley calls- realizing that this could be their big break at becoming sleuths, Ollie creates the impression that he and Stan are detectives and come over to Hartley’s estate to watch over the bomb.

The inventor’s fear that he is being spied upon is confirmed, as someone is looking into his window- and because he has a pencil-thin moustache, you know that he’s a bad guy. It appears that next door, some hoods led by Charlton (Frank Fenton) try to come up with a scheme to get their hands on his sister’s jewels. Dexter, the man peeking through the window, however, is more interested in getting the bomb. Charlton’s dame, Maym (Veda Ann Borg) receives a telegram that her niece Evelyn (Doris Merrick) is coming to visit- this could be the break they’re looking for.

Hartley immediately takes a shining to Evelyn in their “meet cute moment” when she accidentally appears at his house instead of next door; he invites her and her relatives to dinner that evening. However, when Hartley is summoned to Washington that night, he must cancel the plans, which spurs Dexter and his cronies to get the bomb. After a skirmish with the crooks, Laurel and Hardy are used as decoys to deliver the bomb by train to Washington while Hartley takes another mode of transportation. Hartley thinks he has the real bomb—the “detectives” are carrying a fake to distract the hoods. He however is just as dizzy as Stan and Ollie, and soon learns that they have the real bomb!

The appeal of The Big Noise is more in the set pieces. There are plenty of visual gags (related to the plot or otherwise): Ollie climbs a lamppost to read a sign that says “Wet Paint”; Hartley’s paint removing gadget results in Stan spraying paint all over the man’s priceless Van Dyke painting (for some reason no one thinks of simply using the machine to remove the paint from it, but never mind). There is also a very funny dinner scene, where the meal consists of nothing but little capsules, which is so imaginative that it could easily have taken place in a film ten years later, when space age devices were all the rage. 

As if the plot isn’t busy enough, there is also the addition of Hartley’s man-hungry sister Sophie (Esther Howard) who takes a shining to Ollie (the question of her many deceased husbands is subtly answered when she sleepwalks with a knife); young Robert Blake as Hartley’s brat son and Robert Dudley (the inventor in Preston Sturges’ The Palm Beach Story) as the grandfather with an automated wheelchair (ahead of its time, indeed).

The team does recycle an old gag in the train to Washington as they attempt to share space in one crowded sleeping car, also with a drunk who wanders into their bunk, but then the futuristic elements return in the climactic sequence where they get on a remote-controlled plane that is being used for army target practice. The film ends abruptly with a tacked-on conclusion involving a submarine (piloted by both Germans and Japanese!) and a surreal moment where Stan serenades to the fish with his squeezebox (the hiding place for their bomb). 

The jarring ending changes the tone considerably from the lighthearted whimsy that precedes it. The story continuity may be choppy, but The Big Noise has a considerable amount of gags to carry it through: some moments are recycled from their own repertoire (there is even a variation on Stan’s pipe routine), but most are unique (love how they can hear each other perfectly with earplugs, and that bedroom where all the furniture springs from the walls). Forget the accepted truth, this is a very entertaining comedy; and of all their Fox films to feature wartime references, The Big Noise feels the most modern.

Part 5 of this article continues here.