Pack Up Your Troubles (1932) - film review

When America enters WWI in 1917, Stan and Ollie try to avoid being drawn into the fray by pretending to be crippled war veterans.  Alas, a keen-eyed recruiting officer sees through their deception and they are soon in uniform, on their way to the Western Front.  Miraculously, the boys survive the trauma of trench warfare and after the armistice they head back to America with a vital mission to perform.  Their task is to track down the daughter of a friend of theirs who was killed in the war and place her in the care of her grandparents.  Finding the little girl proves to be easy enough.  She is being looked after (if that is the right word) by a bickering couple whose idea of parental care involves beating and intimidation.  Locating the girl’s grandparents is somewhat more difficult, since their surname is Smith.  Having contacted several thousands of Smiths, Stan and Ollie are almost ready to give up.  They are then visited by a child welfare officer who tells them that they must surrender the little girl so that she may be placed in an orphanage.  Appalled by this outcome, the boys realise that they must leave town immediately, and to do this they must find money fast...

Laurel and Hardy’s second feature is something of an oddity, a Chaplinesque melange of slapstick, social realism and sentiment that lacks the coherence and unremitting anarchic fun of the duo’s later full-length films.  Pack Up Your Troubles suffers from a contrived, overly developed plot, which both restrains and hampers the comedy.  There are some deliriously funny comic excursions – the best being the sequence in which Stan and Ollie tumble into a tank and singlehandedly round up an entire battalion of German soldiers.  But there are also some inescapable failings – gaping holes in the plot and a plethora of unsympathetic secondary characters who have no right being in a Laurel and Hardy film.

The scenes in which Stan and Ollie attempt to provide a loving home for the little girl they have taken under their wing certainly have a poignancy that is rare for a L&H film.  Whilst Ollie does the ironing and comes close to maiming himself in the process, Stanley allows the little girl to tell him a bedtime story, with a predictable outcome.  Although the little girl in question (Jackie Lyn Dufton) is visibly struggling with her improvised lines, she ends up virtually stealing the show, and what a joy it is to see her imitating the mannerisms of our two comedy heroes. 

Pack Up Your Troubles may not be one of Laurel and Hardy’s better offerings but that doesn’t make it a bad film.  It takes more than a mangled plot, some inappropriate characterisation and a deluge of sentimentality to quash Stan and Ollie’s comic abilities.  The jokes may be thinner on the ground than in their subsequent films, but when they come they are guaranteed to hit their mark, like an Exocet missile primed with industrial strength laughing gas.   It is enough to make you pack up your troubles (in whichever item of luggage you prefer) and smile, smile, smile.

© Brian Evans 2010

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