A Chump at Oxford (1940) - film review

Down to their last six dollars, Stan and Ollie are reduced to posing as a husband and wife to secure the post of butler and housemaid to the wealthy Vandeveers.  Needless to say, Stan and Ollie’s attempts to help out at a dinner party end disastrously and the duo are soon back in the gutter looking for work.  Employed as street cleaners, they accidentally thwart a bank robbery and are rewarded by the grateful bank’s owner with the thing they crave most, an education.  Where better to study than Oxford, the town of dreaming spires and sparkling intellects.  As soon as they arrive at their college, Stan and Ollie fall prey to a gang of undergraduate pranksters.  Having been tricked into losing their way in a maze, the hapless freshers are then invited to make themselves at home in the Dean’s living quarters.  When they finally make it to their own college rooms, Stan is recognised by his valet as Lord Paddington, the University’s most accomplished scholar and sportsman.  Ollie dismisses this fanciful notion, unable to believe that his dim-witted sidekick could ever have had such a distinguished past.   But when Stan is hit on the head by a falling window he undergoes an immediate and dramatic transformation.  Lord Paddington has returned...

Time was fast running out for Laurel and Hardy when they came to make A Chump at Oxford, the last but one film they made for Hal Roach before their far from successful move to MGM and Twentieth Century Fox.  Despite their long and profitable collaboration, Roach and his legendary comedy double act were keen to part company – Roach wanted to move onto more serious pictures, Stan and Oliver wanted more artistic freedom.  By separating, both sides unwittingly secured a rapid and ignominious decline for themselves.  A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea would be the last gasp for a comedy partnership that, to this day, is unrivalled in its global impact and longevity.

A Chump at Oxford was originally conceived as a forty minute long streamliner, a short film that would accompany a feature film on its cinema release.  To make the film more marketable in Europe, a twenty minute prologue was tagged on to it, making it a standalone feature, the version in which it is usually shown today.  This prologue is a reworking of Laurel and Hardy’s classic short From Soup To Nuts, with Stan Laurel once again dragged up to the nines as the maid Agnès.  This addition not only makes the premise of Stan and Ollie’s arrival at Oxford more plausible but gets the comedy snowball rolling faster than in the original featurette.

The film has one big minus – an interminable mid-section in which the duo wander aimlessly around in a maze, being taunted by a tedious bunch of undergraduates (one of whom is the future horror icon Peter Cushing).  It also has one big plus, which just about redeems this minus: Stan Laurel’s transformation into the ear-wiggling academic super-hero Lord Paddington.  It appears that Stan is not the simpleton we have been led to believe but an intellectual powerhouse that is admired by the world’s greatest thinkers, even Einstein!

In one of the most hilarious and revealing sequences of any Laurel and Hardy film, we see the power balance in Stan’s relationship with his friend suddenly reversed.  Now it is Ollie who is the underdog, taunted by a supercilious master, who rebukes him for even the slightest misdemeanour.  Do we like this new Stanley?  Absolutely not. Laurel’s portrayal of the arrogant upper-class twit is so nuanced and convincing that we long for the loveable old Stanley to return.  And when he does, and the two old friends are happily reunited, we are understandably delighted.

© Brian Evans 2010

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