Big Business (1929)

To me, this movie is perfection.

One of my all time favorites.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Seriously. Laurel & Hardy take a basic comedy situation -- malicious property destruction -- and riff on it for 20 minutes, proceeding from minor damage to a Christmas tree, to the dissection of a car, to the destruction of a house. It's particularly enjoyable watching them confronting common enemies (rather than each other), which shows off their distinct comedic styles to better advantage.It's ironic that "Big Business" was made in 1929, as Hollywood was transitioning to sound. Laurel & Hardy's sound films are much inferior (even the Oscar-winning "The Music Box")."Big Business" is perfect visual comedy, and if you're not rolling on the floor, you are badly humor-impaired. I wish I could give it an 11. Just thinking about it gets me laughing.PS: The reviewer who complained that this is a "one-joke comedy" misses the point. Of course it is! A single idea is taken to its logical (???) conclusion. Which is why I compared it to Bach.

Released the very last year before silent films (at least in Hollywood) once and for all were declared definitely prehistoric, Laurel and Hardy may be said to have made, if one omits Chaplin's two features of the 30's, the final comic masterpiece in the silent medium with BIG BUSINESS. They had proceeded to make pie-throwing appear fresh again a couple of years before in THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY, and this little two-reeler confirms perhaps even more bluntly why the boys, once teamed up, are often thought of as the last great innovators of silent comedy.Trying their luck as wandering salesmen of Christmas-trees, Stan and Ollie predestine the eventual doom of their "business" when ringing the door-bell of James Finlayson. Annoyed as usual, James slams the door in front of the salesmen, causing their tree to get hopelessly stuck. Hardy rings the bell one more time, in order to get James to re-open, so he and his partner can get their object loose, and leave; James interprets this second call as a further intrusion, however, and what follows may be said to be the quint-essential demonstration of the "eye for an eye"-philosophy which so very often characterizes all types of comedy without the public even realizing it. Laurel and Hardy, in BIG BUSINESS and on many later instances, make us painstakingly conscious of this tendency in comedy, and what's more: they make a point of making us conscious of it.It starts off with the tearing of clothes, and goes on to involve furniture, windows, a car and Christmas-trees; all in the name of sweet revenge. As with THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY, Laurel and Hardy does little here that had not been done (and over-done) plenty of times before, if one watches the film superficially. Had not audiences been fed with frustrated maniacs going berserk on all thinkable objects since the rise of the Mack Sennett Studio one and a half decade before? Definitely. But the oldest of jokes can still be funny, if made funny. These three men—Stan, Ollie, and James—are not maniacs, but reasonably respectable gentlemen finding themselves in an unfortunate misunderstanding, which gradually builds up to a series of spiteful acts going beyond the powers of anyone involved. And it's breathtakingly funny.When I was a child, an acquaintance (approaching ninety by now) recalled howling with laughter at this film when it was originally released, and, already a fan of Stan and Ollie, naturally I longed very much to see it for myself. Getting hold on Robert Youngson's cavalcade WHEN COMEDY WAS KING on video, eventually I did; and howled.

Yuletide Mayhem Saturday July 17, 2010, The Castro, San Francisco"Merry Christmas!" Two salesmen who refuse to take "no" for an answer meet their match in an equally stubborn homeowner.Only Stan and Ollie would attempt to sell Christmas trees door-to-door in sunny California. Their failure is of course inevitable, as is the havoc they wreak on the home of unfortunate Jimmy Finlayson, who has the temerity to rile them up! By the time a policeman finally arrives, the house and their truck are all but demolished as a neighborhood crowd watches from the street. Stan pitches breakable objects out a window to a batting Ollie on the lawn, while Finlayson gleefully dismantles their truck, one piece at a time as the cop observes unnoticed.A popular Hollywood myth claims Hal Roach arrived on the set late in the day to discover the cast and crew of Big Business had destroyed the house next-door to the one he purchased for the film!

Based on what I'd heard about it, I didn't think I was going to enjoy this part of the programme much; destruction derbies really aren't my thing, and while I used to love Laurel and Hardy as a child, I've been a bit disappointed recently on re-viewing their work. Well, I was wrong!Admittedly the funny bits of this film consist almost entirely of smashing things up, but somehow it's the completely childish and almost innocent way in which it's done that raises the laughs: Hardy attempting to dig up the lawn one shovelful at a time, Finlayson rolling vainly on the ground in a Christmas-tree-tantrum. And then, of course, there's the mass hysteria of the ending...I don't think I can possibly have enjoyed it as much as the ladies next to me (who were in non-stop whoops for the last ten minutes), but I definitely found it very much funnier than I was expecting.