Customer Reviews

Laurel & Hardy: Finishing Touch [VHS]

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The film is wonderful and worth seeing - the quality and price are just right for my collection of L&H films.

The boys build a house - if you can call it that.

Released Febraury 25, 1928 the film is not dated in the fact that builders are builders even today.

With side kick Edgar Kennedy as a cop the boys are at their best. Their usual method of destruction with comic over tones can be seen here with the throwing of rocks and stepping and swollowing of nails. It is an above average entry rated 3 out of 4 derbies by the L&H books and rates high also by the scholars. Of many of the newer releases it is an average print quality and can be easy on the eyes unlike some of the films I've viewed that are of this same era.

For fans of the team this is a Great addition.

How would you like to live in a house built by Laurel & Hardy? There are some really good gags in this silent film. For example
you see Stan go past the camera with one end of a very long board, and much to Ollie`s amazement Stan is also lugging the other
end of it.
The boys have a couple of run ins along the way with everyone`s favorite keystone cop, Edger Kennedy, and with a very unhappy
nurse from the local hospital who thinks they are making too much noise.
Dispite their best efforts the house is somehow completed on time and the happy owner gives them the bonus he promised them.
Then all look on in horror as a bird lands on the house and it colapses into ruin.
A very funny L&H silent film. It`s a pitty that the silent Laurel & Hardy`s are so hard to find. Many of them are outstanding
comedies.

This is definetly one of their best films.I have a large poster on my bedroom wall that shows Stan and Ollie in a scene from this very film.

This 1928 two-reeler finds Stan and Ollie commissioned to construct a house in one day. However, they predictably end up making the construction site and the house-in-progress into a disaster site, and every time they try to correct their errors or to finally get down to business, things keep getting even worse and more complicated. There's also trouble in the form of Edgar Kennedy, playing, as he almost always did, a cop. There are a lot of great construction-related gags, including the recurring gag of Ollie swallowing a mouthful of nails. The idea of the boys as carpenters would be revisited in their 1933 short 'Busy Bodies,' and is also very similar to the earlier 1920 Buster Keaton two-reeler 'One Week.' Predictably also, the house collapses after all of their hard work and thinking they finally got it right and put everything together correctly, and they have to run from the furious owner. This is a very strong and funny short, although it doesn't perhaps have as much of a clearly structured plot as some of their other work. However, that's not really important, since the comedy and strength of the material outweigh minor quibblings about how the plot might have been tighter. The end is also kind of sudden, like there's something more that should happen after that, although some of their other shorts and features had similar in media res endings. A number of critics and fans see this as just an average run-of-the-mill short, but I quite like it and would probably place it somewhere in my Top 10 of my favorite L&H silents.