JL: PARDON US began life as a short subject, but was expanded tofeature length during mid-production. It was therefore wasa film with an episodic structure, the result of adding to the originalstory as they went along. The haphazard construction of PARDON USis regarded as a fault by many critics, but I find it less of a problemin this film than in L&H's next feature, PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES, afilm with more tangents and subplots than you'll find at a RobertAltman festival. As John B. has mentioned, Stan and Ollie playingwith salt and pepper shakers was all the "plot" they ever needed.Loose construction is therefore not an inherent flaw, as long as theindividual episodes are well-written and funny.
A bit of continuity is provided by one ofL&H's better running gags, that of Stan's buzzing loosetooth. This is the sort of gag that can become tiresome quickly,but its every appearance in PARDON US is inspired. Cops, fellowprisoners, and the prison warden mistake the buzzy tooth for a Bronxcheer, and it is also used at key intervals to further the story.It helps ingratiate Stan to the prison's toughest inmate, the Tiger(who interprets Stan's razzberry for a display of courage); it sets upthe painful-but-funny dentist office routine; and its use as a closinggag suggests that things have come full circle for beer barons Stan andOllie, and that they are destined to repeat all past mistakes.
This film, however, needs no such devices tomaintain continuity, for it is the individual scenes -- many of themself-contained vignettes -- that are its strength. It is almost avaudeville review starring Laurel and Hardy, with a prison backdrop asits linking motif. There are delightful burlesque-style routines-- in addition to the aforementioned dentist bit, we have the oldstaple "The Schoolroom Sketch." It features some excrutiating andstale puns and stock gags (Fin: "There is no 'i' in needle!"/Stan:"Then it's a rotten needle!"), and we laugh because such jokes havenever been better served. PARDON US also has loads of great songsin a variety of bygone styles. "I Wish I was in Michigan,"performed by an inmate vocal quartet, is always cited as a favorite,but notable too are the songs performed at the plantation where L&Hhide out in blackface. There is no real need for the blackfacesequence to be as long as it is. It might even play better forcomedy purposes if it were whittled down to a) establishing Stan andOllie's creative means of hiding out; and b) helping the warden outwith his car (whereupon they are discovered and taken back toprison). But it's clear that this scene exists for the music, andit's clear that the music exists for padding. But when themusic's this good, who cares? (For full appreciation of thissequence, seek out the longer version of PARDON US, describedabove.) We also get a song from Ollie and an eccentric dance fromStan, so it's hard to complain about padding or loss of comic pace.
The pace of the film is, in fact, quite good,with low-keyed and raucous moments nicely interspersed. It alsoflows well, in that the seamless transitions ensure that we don'tnotice that each scene doesn't have much to do with the one that camebefore it. PARDON US may not rank as Laurel & Hardy'sgreatest cinematic achievement, but it's a competently-made effortthat's funnier than about half of the Roach-era features. Themain reason for its high laugh content is the performances of L&H,seen here at their most basic -- although this rendition of theircharacters is as inconsequential as it is funny.
Stan and Ollie have neither wives nor the realworld with which to contend in this film -- they are instead in acontained environment with a bunch of thugs. In addition, with noresouces and no control over their destinies, they are rendered withsomewhat less depth in this film. There are few extended dialoguesequences, no "So it's come to this!" moments of self-reflection, andlittle insight into their characters. They, like the film, existfor gags and songs. They are still very much Stan and Ollie, butit is perhaps the lack of meaningful interchange between them --something found in every great L&H film -- that renders PARDON US amore forgettable, if not necessarily less funny, film than thetop-ranked classics. Fans love such films as SONS OF THE DESERT,WAY OUT WEST, Helpmates, Towed in A Hole, et al, because we love thethings that Stan and Ollie do and say in these films and how theyinteract with one another. Funny as they are in PARDON US,there's not enough of this stuff for us to develop any real fondnessfor them.
In all, PARDON US is a pleasurable little filmand a fine feature debut by Laurel and Hardy. But they would goon to make features that would be much more than pleasurable littlefilms.
JB: As a Laurel and Hardy feature, PARDON US doesn't measure up toSONS OF THE DESERT or BLOCK-HEADS, or even A CHUMP AT OXFORD or THEBOHEMIAN GIRL. As an accidental Laurel and Hardy feature, it'snot bad at all.
The early sound films often suffered fromfunereal pacing and occasional laughable over-acting. Even aclassic like Warner Brothers' LITTLE CAESAR suffered this way.But LITTLE CAESAR featured a breakout performance by Edward G. Robinsonwhich overshadowed all the movie's defects. Laurel and Hardydon't have the same impact here (by now, audiences were thoroughlyfamiliar with them, whereas Robinson was an unknown) and PARDON US'sbad points are always noticeable no matter how many funny scenes TheBoys can improvise. There is an ongoing battle throughout betweenthe film's wobbly structure and slow pace, and Laurel and Hardy's puretalent at clowning. In the end, it is close, but The Boys win theday.
PARDON US is a prison movie with about as muchplot as The Hoose-gow and perhaps less plot than The Second HundredYears, but it is longer than both those films plus Libertycombined. One scene takes place, and then another, but not muchhappens beyond Laurel and Hardy going to prison and meeting up with acouple of tough mugs. I get the feeling that this feature, whichstarted as a two-reeler, was basically made up as they wentalong. ("What if we recreate the dentist scene from Leave 'EmLaughing here? And I've got this old jokebook, we could do aschoolroom scene.") There is a great deal of padding in PARDONUS, but what lifts the film up above some of their later features isthat the padding is as entertaining as the rest of the film, and itmost of it is centered on Laurel and Hardy anyway.
Above, my colleague states there is no realneed for the plantation scene to be as long as it is. I'll go onefurther: there is no real need for the plantation scene at all.Nothing happens that matters to the story at all. Laurel andHardy break out of prison, they hide out, they get caught, they go backto prison. Their relationship with the rest of the principalcharacters has not altered one bit by the end of this sequence, whichcould be neatly edited out of the film with first time viewers beingnone the wiser. The sequence is padding, pure and simple,existing for no other reason than to stretch things out out to featurelength, and yet, it is my favorite part of the film. Althoughtoday it could be considered offensive, as it shows two white peopledressing up in blackface and hiding out amongst the blacks on a cottonplantation (and surely this scene would be cut on broadcasttelevision), it is essentially innocent. Laurel and Hardy mean noharm by their ruse, nor do they make fun of their new companions in anyway, and the scene doesn't make me wince as does an earlier "Amos andAndy" joke, or a similar blackface scene in The Marx Brothers' A DAY ATTHE RACES. The Boys work as hard as the rest at picking cotton(Ollie delicately removing any imperfections from each bud beforegently placing them into his canvas bag, Stan bending and stuffingcotton plants wholesale into his), and at the end of the day they notonly thoroughly enjoy the spirituals sung by the workers, but join inthe fun with Ollie's beautiful rendition of "Lazy Moon" (a realchestnut that dates back to the early 1900s), followed by Stan's danceroutine.
And there are good laughs to be found heretoo, not only in the contrast of cotton-picking styles mentioned above,but in a gag Hal Roach once complained went over the heads of the 1931audiences. When the Warden (Wilfred Lucas) discovers Laurel andHardy have escaped, he sends out his prize bloodhounds to findthem. Later at the plantation, The Boys are finished work for theday, and Ollie gives a whistle. The prize bloodhounds scamperdirectly to him, as the Warden's prize bloodhounds are now Stan andOllie's pets. Perhaps it took 70 years for the gag to ripen, ormaybe I am just more sophisticated than your average 1931 movie-goer,but I think it is the best gag in the picture.
Another scene that is in the film only to makeit longer (and provide some chuckles) is the schoolroom scene,where Professor Finlayson quizzes his "pupils". It is obviously aclass in The History of Minstrel Show Jokes, and Fin's textbook isprobably the same jokebook used by Our Gang in a very similar scenefrom School's Out, filmed around the same time. Most of thesejokes were groaners when I first read them in BOY'S LIFE 25 years ago,but as Abbott and Costello's best patter routines prove, in the handsof the right comedians, any old joke can come alive. Laurel andHardy and company are almost anticipating the heights of absurdity TheMarx Brothers would reach in their own classroom scene (modelled aftertheir vaudeville act) in HORSE FEATHERS the next year. Thesimilarity is strongest when Professor Fin says "We will now take theroll call. Those who are here will say present - those who arenot here will say absent" in a cadence that almost sounds likeGroucho's Professor Wagstaff himself. (And just as Groucho wouldhave done, Fin forgets the idea of taking the roll call as soon as heis finished saying the line. The joke's the thing - say it andmove on.) Again, the schoolroom scene doesn't do anything to movethings along, but as a scene that stops the movie dead in its tracks,it's hard to beat.
Despite how we may kid him at Laurel and HardyCentral, Walter Long was an inspired addition to the Laurel and Hardystock company, and the perfect foil for the very timid version ofLaurel and Hardy found here. Gruff, unwashed, with an ugly facecapable of being twisted into something even uglier at a moment'snotice, Long is one of the best elements in PARDON US. Like thebest L&H foils, Long played a tough egg with just the right degreeof exaggeration. Wilfred Lucas, on the other hand, must come infor some criticism. When he is softly lecturing The Boys (..."andyou are 'my boys'..."), he is wonderful, as are The Boys' reactions tohim. But he overacts his dramatic scenes, embrassingly shoutinghis lines and gesticulating wildly, as if he was no longer in a quietlittle Laurel and Hardy comedy but a revival of THE DRUNKARD. Hemay have been overplaying his part for comic purposes, but the cameraoften lingers too long on him, forcing him to seemingly ad-lib moreuninspired dialogue.
PARDON US is overlong by at least a reel andcould have been even longer. Cut from the film was a scene whereThe Boys rescue the Warden's daughter from a fire (which would havethen been the reason they were given the pardon), a gag outside theprison where Stan reveals he has their mug shots as a momento of theirstay in prison, and a final scene, some years into the future, where anow bearded Stan and Ollie have just finished telling some localchildren the story of how they wound up in jail. TheSpanish-language version retains the first two scenes but not the lastone. The title given this version was "De Bote en Bote", which aMexican friend of mine once explained literally means"From Ship toShip", but idiomatically means "From One Thing to Another"- as apt a title for this disjointed but enjoyable feature as any.
