A Chump at Oxford [Region 2] (1940)

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 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).