Death-dealing spousal retribution brings down the curtain while Ollie’s Teddy Roosevelt impression laughs and laughs before being belted by his own wife. Past is then knocked unconscious, and in a truly extraordinary scene, Laurel escorts a strange creature made of both Finlayson and Past out of the front door, only to be confronted by his own real wife. Past crashes the dinner party, and Stan tries to pass her off as his own wife. Stanley tries taking Past out for dinner, is spotted by the local bitter gossip, and subsequently has to deal with the jealousy of his own wife. Finlayson’s factotum, the hapless Stanley, is dispatched to distract The Past while the Finlaysons host a dinner party. This “Past” barges into Finlayson’s office, threatening to wreck Finlayson’s marriage with evidence such as the seaside photo shown above. James Finlayson plays a successful and respected citizen, but a man with a past. Charlie Hall appeared again and again as an angry little man within the chronicles of Stan and Ollie, and here he’s playing the butler who would be played by Finlayson in Chickens Come Home. Mae Busch meanwhile is a delicious female antagonist, terrifying and sexy, elegant and violent, and a team player who implicitly understood the way in which Laurel and Hardy films are timed and cadenced. He was superb at playing ludicrous authority figures, characters whose bluster is erected upon a slender, wobbly, and apoplectic foundation. When talkies came along, he pioneered the comedic use of the word “D’Oh!” some sixty years before Homer Simpson. The very great and very Scottish James Finlayson was of course, a master of the double take. If we want to chart “firsts” then this one deserves to be noted as the first film featuring Laurel, Hardy, Finlayson, Charlie Hall and Mae Busch. The premise of this one would be remade with sound as a proper Laurel and Hardy film (Chickens Come Home), this time with Ollie in the Finlayson role. It is in fact a Laurel and Finlayson film, with Finlayson being credited as Jimmy rather than James. This is another Stan Laurel film in which Oliver Hardy has very little to do, other than to sit and resemble Teddy Roosevelt. It’s 1927 and astonishingly, we think to ourselves (with the benefit of decades of smug hindsight), the Hal Roach studio still hasn’t figured out that Stan and Ollie belong together.
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