Way out West

In the middle of the night in a western town, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are trying to break into a saloon. Olly has his finger’s pinched badly in the sliding gate barring the front door and, then, falls through the flimsy roof of a lean-to shanty to the building. Stan has an inspiration: “There’s a block and tackle,” he says, “I’ll hoist you up.” Of course, Olly agrees to this harebrained scheme and you can, more or less, imagine the outcome. Except, of course, you can’t and the manner in which the anticipated calamity is stranger and more intricate and funnier than the viewer expects accounts for the appeal of “Way out West, one of the best Laurel and Hardy comedies from the later thirties. (It was released i937).There is a classical symmetry and balance to this comedy -- it is the visual equivalent of a musical composition from the classical era, perhaps, a little minuet or a rondo ala Turk by Mozart. The gags are set up with elaborate precision and the comedy proceeds, generally, along clear-cut lines of force and motion -- that is, according to the Newtonian laws of action and reaction, gravity and acceleration, but the ingenuity in the film resides in the little flourishes, the grace-notes, the curious cadences that are, at once, familiar, wholly expected, and, yet, also subtly different and better than we can foresee. “Way out West” has a simple and melodramatic plot that is, of course, merely a framework from which to suspend vaudeville routines and set-pieces. Stan and Olly have traveled to a dusty western city to deliver the deed to a gold mine to a virtuous (and lovely) orphan girl. The poor girl is enslaved to a vicious bar-keep (Jimmy Finlayson) and his saloon-chanteuse wife -- she is a peroxide blonde with slinky lingerie like a poor man’s Mae West. Laurel and Hardy are duped into giving the deed to Lola, the wicked blonde. When they discover their error, a protracted battle follows over the deed but, in the end, Finlayson prevails and locks the deed away and pursued by the sheriff, the boys depart the town. But, later, they return in the dark of night to retrieve the precious paper -- hence, their elaborate and botched efforts to break and enter the residential second story of the saloon. The film is only 65 minutes long and the short film includes three excellent song-and-dance numbers, including the famous duet “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Oliver Hardy dances with curious and stately grace -- his soft-shoe routine performed against a rear-projection screen of the busy western village, in fact, justifies my reference to Mozart: he prances and bows and curtsy’s with a dainty late Baroque or early classical aplomb: it is as if he performing to an allemande by Mozart. There are elaborate and complex one-take jokes: in one scene, Oliver has lost a locket somewhere in the depths of his baggy garments and has to undress in front of a lady so that Stan can locate the jewelry, a kind of strip-tease that he performs with cautious and bashful courtliness. Olly keeps losing his clothing and we see him sitting soft as a marshmallow and partly nude in the studio woods, sometimes smoking a corncob pipe or riding like a pasha on a travois drawn by Dinah, the mule. The picture has a sprightly and unforced surrealism -- Stan has magical powers: he can ignite his thumb and use it as a lighter and, in the musical numbers, he’s able to sing in an operatic falsetto as well as in a preposterously deep basso profundo voice. The mule ends up in someone’s bedroom eating a mattress and dogs gnaw at a raw steak used for shoe leather and Stan eats Olly’s hat, first tucking a napkin into his shirt and, then, salting the piece of haberdashery. Like a Mozart overture, the film returns to certain thematic material -- there’s a clear sense of departure from a theme, improvisation, and, then, a stately return to that theme: in the river that must be forded there is a pot-hole that will always swallow Olly when the boys cross the knee-deep stream and Stan’s proficiency at using his thumb as a Zippo lighter will lead Olly to accidentally ignite his own digits at an inopportune moment. Early in the film, Stan must use that same thumb as a hitchhiker to hail a passing stagecoach. He makes a fist and is puzzled to observe that his thumb is gone -- it’s vanished and he doesn’t know where to find it until he unclenches his fist and finds the thumb on the end of his hand where it has always been. It doesn’t matter anyhow: Stan stops the stagecoach by baring a comely calf and ankle exactly like Claudette Colbert in “It Happened One Night”.