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Laurel & Hardy: Why Girls Love Sailors [VHS]

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This pre-teaming short is easily one of Stan's two or three best performances of the many he did in drag. More often than not he was doing little more than just wearing a dress and a wig, but here he totally lives it up and really gets into his performance as a woman. Stan plays Willie Brisling, who is having some fun horsing around with his cute fiancée Nellie, played by Viola Richards, until the burly captain of a ship comes bursting in. The captain humiliates Stan and makes off with his girl, but he manages to run after them and sneaks onto the ship just as it's pulling out of port. Viola is unafraid to hold her own, as witnessed by how she chases one of her would-be other suitors out of her cabin with a gun and gives him two black eyes, but Stan knows he has to do something drastic to get rid of all of the other guys on the ship. He goes into another cabin and finds some jewelry, a wig, and womens' clothing in a trunk, and gets the bright idea to put them on, lure all of the other sailors behind a wall, and knock them out, then sit them down in their unconscious state and throw something at or make a rude noise in the direction of first mate Ollie, after which he disappears and lets the sailors take the blame. It works like a charm, and Ollie throws all of them overboard. However, he sees Stan after the last sailor is disposed of and begins flirting with him. Shortly after he tells him to close his eyes so he can kiss a woman for the first time since he was in Africa, the captain's wife arrives, and Ollie believes the leg dangling in front of him belongs to Stan. He is rudely awaken when he realises who this woman really is. The captain's wife storms off to see her husband (an intertitle has told us that she's got "a month of marital bickering to catch up on"), and finds Stan sitting on her husband's lap and doing some heavy flirting and making out. Furious, she grabs a gun, but her wrath is briefly stopped when Stan reveals his true identity and says it was all a test. However, Nellie comes into the cabin again, and the wife is once again furious, and grabs her gun again. The short ends as the clothes are blown off of both Stan and Nellie as they're walking away. This might not be one of their greatest pre-teaming shorts, but there is a lot of great pre-code humor in it, like when Stan's skirts blow up over the bloomers he's got on underneath and when he's sitting in the lap of the randy captain and being amorous with him.

This is not what you would call a real Laurel & Hardy film, but both of them are in it. They were not yet a team nor had they started
to develope the characters that would make them famous. Still it`s a pretty good silent comedy.
Ollie plays a pompus womanizing ships captian that has made off with Stan`s girl and carried her off to his ship. Stan dresses up
in drag to try to rescue her. While not in the same class as later L&H silents, the results still make for some very good humor.