Customer Reviews

A Chump at Oxford

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THIS DVD FEATURES 2 VERSIONS OF LAUREL AND HARDY IN CHUMPS AT OXFORD. MY FAVORITE IS THE 63 MINUTE VERSION LISTED UNDER SPECIAL FEATURES. IT HAS A SCENE WHEN LAUREL DRESSES UP AS OLLIE'S WIFE SO THEY CAN GET A JOB AS A MAID AND BUTLER IN AN ARISTOCRATIC HOME. THEY RUIN THE DINNER PARTY AND ARE CHASED OUT. THEY GET A JOB WHERE THEY ARE STREET CLEANERS AND LAUREL DROPS A BANANA PEEL OUTSIDE OF A BANK. WHEN A BANK ROBBER TRIPS OVER THE PEEL, THE BANK PRESIDENT GIVES THEM A PAID COLLEGE DGREE AT OXFORD. WHEN STAN AND LAUREL ARRIVE AT OXFORD, THEY ARE INITIATED BY FELLOW STUDENTS WHO HELP THEM GET LOST AND THEN GIVE THEM THE DEAN'S LIVING QUARTERS. LAUREL RECEIVES A BUMP ON THE HEAD WHEN HE GETS CAUGHT IN A WINDOW. NOW HE THINKS THAT HE IS LORD PADDINGTON, A FORMER ALUMNI OF OXFORD. HE MAKES OLLIE HIS PRIVATE BUTLER UNTIL ANOTHER BUMP ON THE HEAD BRINGS HIM BACK TO HIMSELF. THROUGH OUT THIS SHOW YOU WIL LAUGH YOURSELF SILLY AND WONDER WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT. THERE'S NOTHING BETTER TO RELAX YOUR MIND THAN AN OLD FASHIONED COMEDY LIKE THIS.

Though unwieldy in its construction, "A Chump at Oxford" (1940) represents the last film with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy at full comic throttle. Laurel's transformation into the brilliant Lord Paddington is a revelation, with Hardy equally effective as the diminished valet. This DVD includes the 42-minute featurette and the expanded 63-minute European release. It's nice to compare both versions since the edits are completely different.

Although the domestic version is always worth a look (and sustained laughs), the European version has finally arrived to the joy and merriment of the long-suffering L & H fans used to bad prints and bad TV edits.
The expanded version has multiple applications, one, for all intents and purposes, the status as the unofficial final two-reeler of Laurel and Hardy! You may scratch your head (or wiggle your ears), saying, the final short subject was "Thicker Than Water" in 1935. But in 1939 Roach remade a silent comedy as the 21-minute beginning to the already shot 42 minute domestic release. They play Butler and Maid (interesting that Stan plays "Agnes" - basically the same character he played in the 1930 "Another Fine Mess", also a movie where the boys, as usual on the outside looking in, this time to a vacated mansion where they have to play servants for an unexpected couple looking to rent a home) for a huge gathering hosted by James Finlayson and Anita Garvin, in her last L & H appearance. (Oh yeah, that's the number two point for the fans and historians). Not unexpectedly, they make a shambles of things.
I cannot detect alternate footage or different cuts, as many have pointed out, in the rare print. I did notice that the film quality is superior. The 42 minute CAO looks like a syndication print - well-worn, I might add.
The movie itself is surely a Classic. Stan and Ollie are street cleaners -long before it was appealing for College graduates - and they stumble upon success by causing an exiting bank robber to stumble on the banana peel that Stan has tossed aside during their lunch break. Stan figures, they're sanitation men, so it'll get cleaned up after lunch. They are rewarded with their dream....an education! At Oxford!!
Interesting that there's a somewhat bizarre alteration to their characters. In today's jargon, they come as "dumbed down" (could that be possible?) versions of themselves. Particularly at the dinner party (the long CAO) Ollie is actually slightly coarse and boisterous as he shouts out the upgraded seating arrangements; Stan easily slumps down in his chair, to do some serious imbibing of wine which he was instructed to "take". He then carelessly throws the salad at the guests. The "old" Stan, though inebriated, would have been more cautious and careful. Later, they give no benefit of the doubt to the Dean, who has rudely entered his own quarters - they're half-crocked, and rather threatening, as they confront him from their spot in his bed, and with a clutch of his booze on the bedstand. So an element of The Three Stooges has found its' way into the L & H playbook here. In their previous picture, "The Flying Dueces" (incidentally, not a Hal Roach production), there was also a noticeable difference: they're more into the "real world" vernacular, as they demand a pay raise of Charles Middleton, while they carry on in Foreign Legion. (Makes one wonder if some of those much maligned post-Roach opuses for Fox and MGM deserved that level of criticism, when it seems that Stan Laurel decided to make the boys a little less lovable, if you will, and more in the vein of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, for example. A more brash, fast-talkin', situation-driven style.
Back to England: After they sort out a few details, like who actually *is* the Dean, and who *isn't* the Dean's Assistant, and enrage some well-entrenched students including Mr. Charles Hall, early L & H nemesis, missing on film for perhaps four years (point #3), Stan has an encounter with a self-closing window in the real Dean's office, and this action results in one of the most memorbale transformnations in movie history: Stan becomes Lord Paddington, worldclass scholar and athlete. It's a little vague, but his true personality/couldn't be "alter ego", now has such status as to displace the Dean Of Oxford! And now Ollie, "Stan's" former mentor and friend must serve tea and crumpets to Stan....Lord Paddington.
Stan's Paddington has pomposity to equal his mental prowess. He insults Ollie at every turn. When Ollie tumbles to the floor trying to move in the way Paddington advises, there's no concern for his well-being...just the rug.
When it was all said and done, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy offered much more than pratfalls and flying lemon marangue pies.
This DVD is such an example.

Stan and Ollie are jobless and down on their luck. Before long, their jobs as a maid and butler (Stan forced to dress up in drag) go wrong, and they end up as street-sweepers. After, unwittingly, foiling a bank robbery, they are rewarded by the bank manager with an education. This leads to them going to an Oxford college, where they soon fall foul of student pranks. After Stan is hit on the head by a sliding window, both he and Ollie get an education they weren't expecting.
When I first saw this film, around twenty years ago, it was one of my favourite Laurel and Hardy films, and I'd still say that now. This is L&H at their purest - hilarious situations, great characters and a warmth so lacking in most of today's comedy. In fact I'd say there's never a dull moment in this film, would put it up there with 'Way Out West' as L&H's finest.

Arguably Laurel and Hardy's last funny feature, 'A Chump at Oxford' is the film where we discover that Stan is actually an amnesiac, who, before an accident, was the fabulously wealthy, intellectually pioneering, athletically record-beating, and very English, Lord Paddington. Not only does Lord Stan thrash an army of malevolent Oxbridge undergrads (including a youngish Peter Cushing!), but he arranges luncheon with a certain Professor Einstein to straighten a certain theory the latter's been having trouble with.

The plot - after a series of disastrous menial jobs, the accidental foiling of a bank robbery sees the boys rewarded with the Oxbridge eduction they felt they were always lacking - is merely a flimsy structure on which to hang some classic, short-like sequences. These are brilliant from the start - including an upper-class dinner party at which Ollie plays butler and Stan is the maid who gives a new meaning to salad without dressing. The dark themes - Ollie and Stan going round in self-defeating circles; the intolerance of an uncomprehending world - are lightly developed.

But when the pair finally reach Oxford, the film achieves the sublime. Being naive Americans, they are instantly ragged by the smarmy English undergraduates. In the most amazing, frightening and central sequence, they are given wrong directions to the Registrar's - at the other end of a garden maze! Going round in ever hopeless circles (fabulously visualised by trick editing so that they don't seem to leave the frame, despite walking out of it), with Stan at one point literally taking the exit with him, and Ollie burdened like an elephant with a huge trunk (of the suitcase variety), and two bags ('Get a grip!' Stan places his on top!), they decide to spend the night in their prison. Here they are pestered by a student dressed as a ghost - his disembodied hand, messing with Ollie's hankie and Stan's pipe, gives the film a chilling Surrealist frisson.

If this is the film's most resonant sequence, the two funniest are to come - the boys being tricked into treating the Dean's chambers as their own (and having a messy booze-up) and the gloriously weird Paddington set-piece, Stan enunciating a Wodehousean vocabulary and manically wriggling his ears. The slow, patient, accumulative construction of comic crescendos is given plenty of space by the unobtrusive filming.

A CHUMP AT OXFORD, one of the team's final flicks for comedic soul-mate producer, Hal Roach, hasn't aged as well as some other Laurel & Hardy Features -- but it has several bits making it a must for comedy fans, aspiring comedians, or any young person just discovering this first class comedy team. And these days you almost have to be on an expedition to find their movies, since many are no longer re-issued on video.

A CHUMP AT OXFORD actually seems like several little movies edited together and, indeed, according to one account the dinner scene which opens this movie -- a reprise of a silent film comedy dinner scene -- was added later. No matter what the real behind-the-scenes story is, this scene, featuring the hilarious Jimmy Finlayson, original creator of the "DOUGH!" popularized in recent years by Homer Simpson, is a scream.

Still, this scene's supposedly big comedy payoff -- Stan coming out in his long underwear (after being told to serve the salad "undressed"), causing scandalized women to faint -- is outdated for today's audiences (younger ones will wonder what all the fainting is all about since the long underwear barely resembles what most people wear for underwear today).

BUT there are three key reasons why you need to get this video:

1: STAN LAUREL'S UNUSUAL ROLE: When "the boys" thwart a robbery and are rewarded with paid education at Oxford and arrive in England, a bump on the head transforms Stan into the aristocratic, brilliant Lord Paddington.
This not only gives viewers a glimpse of Stan Laurel's acting ability but perhaps gives a better view of the "real" Stan, who was no dummy (he was the brains behind many of the team's bits and helped edit a lot of the earlier, funnier movies). In his role as upper-class gentleman, the new Stan bosses around and verbally humiliates the usually dominant Hardy. This is one of the few movies where Stan aims a "fat" joke (as Lord Paddington) at Hardy.
Hardy plays off against this new incarnation of a smart, bossy Laurel with sheer perfection. No comedy team has ever melded as one better than Laurel and Hardy. There truly was magic there (perhaps matched only by Jackie Gleason and Art Carney at their best).
SPECIAL NOTE: when Stan wiggles his ears it was NOT done with special effects. He could do it.

2. THE LOST IN THE MAZE BIT: When L&H are lost in a maze, they sit down to rest. A student clad in a skeleton costume sneaks up behind them and puts his arms under their shoulders, using his hands as their hands while the completely out-of-it L&H try to smoke with "their" hands. It's hard to describe this comedy bit but the timing is so absolutely perfect and execution of this piece of nuttiness so seamless that you have to laugh loudly. This scene is worth the price of this video. Any comedy buff or aspiring comedian MUST view this short bit!!!

3. A YOUNG PETER CUSHING: Before all the horrors.

Overall, the first half of the movie is funnier but the second is more worthwhile, since nothing can possibly top the bit in the maze -- or the startling transformation of dim-witted Stan into a Stan perhaps closer to the "real" Stan Laurel (who unlike Lord Paddington was reported to be a real sweetheart in real life by everyone who knew him).

I have waited for a long time for A Chump At Oxford to come out on DVD. It has been one of my most favorite Laurel and Hardy films. I laughed until my sides hurt. My wife who only somewhat likes L & H, thought it was very funny.
If you like Laurel and Hardy films and you want a quality DVD, buy this one. Picture and sound were excellent.

I'm glad that I could finally get one of my favorite Laurel & Hardy movies on DVD. It's a good transfer, and the quality is much better than the VHS that I have. I was surprised to see that the US version didn't include several scenes that I've always assumed were part of the movie. I was very happy that the longer version which includes those scenes was on the DVD.

This was an enjoyable Laurel & Hardy movie. The CD came with an "American" version, and a longer "European" version. Beside the European version being longer, I noticed a few subtle differences in the way the 2 versions were edited. It was a feature film later in their career that gives the unique experience of seeing Stan Laurel being transformed into another personality. After being hit on the head by a loose window pane, he becomes a big-man-on-campus called "Lord Paddington". I haven't seen every Laurel & Hardy film, but I would say this one is worth a viewing.

One of their best films! I grew up watching this on TV and now I have it and can view it anytime I want. Anyone who is a fan of these 2 great comedians should definitely have this film in their library. There are some classic comedy episodes in this film that will bring back memories for some and open up Laurel & Hardy to a new generation of viewers.