Berth Marks (1929)

So much average

Good concept, poorly executed.

Yo, there's no way for me to review this film without saying, take your *insert ethnicity + "ass" here* to see this film,like now. You have to see it in order to know what you're really messing with.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

I'm told this is the second sound film for Laurel and Hardy. They really look young in this one. They are a couple musicians, trying to get to a gig. They manage to get an upper berth on a train, so both have to sleep in the same bed. As they work their way through the close quarters, they do some troubling things. This time they don't pay the price because other people are mistaken for their actions. The ongoing joke has to do with people ripping up each other's clothes. The boys spend their time trying to locate music that Stan has misplaced and everywhere they go, trouble ensues. We can see the comic genius here. Obviously, they also did many silent features.

The laughs are as solid as classical music in this comedy short that is not just directed. It's choreographed. Stan and Ollie are vaudevillians heading to Pottsville with one fiddle and no music. "Why do you want to go to Pottsville?", they are asked aboard the train, and explain their profession. "I bet you're good", the conductor tells them in a deadpan manner, obviously dubious about their act. For 20 minutes, the train ride they take is the track to comic disaster, and no passenger will have any peace as long as they are aboard. There won't be any room left for marks in their berth, but hopefully there'll be oxygen near by for viewers laughing non- stop. I rank this among their top two reelers, and one of the great early talkie comedies period. Imagine the sight of chubby Stanley and skinny Laurel trying to undress, literally cheek to cheek.This deserves solid attention, because the funniest bits are so subtle that distracted viewers could easily miss them. I didn't spot the young Paulette Goddard, but it'll be fun to go through the train sequences and pause the DVD (excellently transferred on a beautiful collection of Laurel & Hardy shorts and features from their Hal Roach days) to find her.

I've been catching quite a few of Laurel and Hardy's film shorts lately, both silent and talkie, and one item of note for this picture is that there seems to be a fair amount of close-ups of the Boys that weren't standard for most of their work. This is most likely due to the limited space in which most of the story takes place, though it's not much of a story when you get right down to it. Stan and Ollie go through an inordinate amount of contortions in order to get ready to take a nap in their upper train berth. It actually gets to be very physical and I had to wonder if they might have suffered any amount of pain or bruises while falling down a small ladder or inadvertently sticking a foot in each other's face. In the meantime, the rest of the passengers on board revel in tearing each other's clothes off due to an unintended accident initiated by Stan. A lot of this was pretty standard stuff for Laurel and Hardy, and the version I saw courtesy of Turner Classics had their traditional 'Cuckoo Song' opening the program. As this is considered by many to be their first talking picture, I don't know if the Cuckoo music was there from the beginning or added later, but it was a neat reminder of the way I remembered these shorts when I was a kid watching them in the Fifties. Great memories and great to see them all over again.

Several published works on Laurel And Hardy seem to rate this as one of the boys' poorest shorts. How dare they! This is extremely funny - if not quite top drawer - Stan and Ollie. An early talkie, half the film is simply our two heroes trying to get undressed in the upper berth of a sleeper train, getting entangled in each others trousers, night-shirts etc. The boys have also inadvertently set the rest of the passengers against each other, via a method I won't spoil by revealing. It's simplicity itself, yet it works wonderfully well. When most comedies of the twenties and thirties have long been forgotten, the films of these two lovable characters continue to delight.The real secret is surely in their universal humanity; there's a little bit of Stan and Ollie in all of us.