The Music Box *****

 

next up in the 1930s countdown, a short masterpiece…

by Allan Fish

(USA 1932 30m) DVD1/2

Where are Pickfords when you need them?

p  Hal Roach  d  James Parrott  w  H.M.Walker

Stan Laurel (Stan), Oliver Hardy (Ollie), Billy Gilbert (Professor Theodore Von Schartzenhoffen), Charlie Hall (postman),

What can one say about this?  The Music Box is three reels of absolute perfection, thirty minutes of laugh upon laugh, wince upon wince and shudder upon shudder.  The great duo made many great shorts in their early talkie days, including Towed in a Hole with its boat-wrecking scene, Busy Bodies with the car being sawn in half, Laughing Gravy with the poor eponymous dog and Dirty Work with Sam Adams’ unctuous butler declaring “you can’t miss the fireplace, it’s up against the wall.”  All are great in themselves, but none of them are as immortal as The Music Box or cause so much destruction. 

            A married woman visits a music store and buys a pianola for her professor husband’s birthday.  It is to be delivered to her home and the delivery men are, of course, the deliciously inept dungareed duo we know and love, who have pooled together their resources (all three dollars and eighty cents) to set up a delivery business.  Their motto is “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow” – make of that what you will.  They pull over a postman to ask directions to 1127 Walnut Avenue and are directed to the top of a stoop, approached by endless flights of steps, which they attempt to climb to deliver the pianola and cause chaos as they go.  All along we know that there is bound to be another entrance by road to save such hassle, and this is confirmed later on by the self same postman.  They get it half way up before an obnoxious woman with a pram insists they take it right back down so she can take her baby down the stairs.  Then they get half way up again when a cop calls them down who the woman has sent to complain to them.  Stan goes down to investigate.  He gets all the way down before the cop tells him it’s Ollie he wants.  Stan calls up “he doesn’t want me, he wants the other monkey.”  Ollie looks around for a monkey before realising he means him.  He goes down only for the cop to do little more than say “let that be a lesson to you.”  They then begin the slow climb again and are stopped by the same professor the pianola is unknowingly for, who insists they get out of the way for him by reciting his name and more initials than you can hope to remember.  Finally they get the beast – which by now is probably as tuneful as Ennio Morricone’s Bad Orchestra in Once Upon a Time in the West – to the top and proceed to climb three extra steps into a fountain by the house.  Finally getting it ready to take inside, they are met by the postman who tells them what we already guessed, that they’ve pulled it up this way for nothing.  However, rather than just shrug their shoulders as they’ve got the thing up anyway, they begin to take it all the way down, to drive it round to the other entrance and bring it back to the very same place.  It’s an act that sums up the duo’s dumb appeal more than any other, pure unadulterated stupidity personified.   Finally, about a week later it seems, they get the pianola into the house, following attempts via pulleys and ropes and everything else you can imagine.  Hats are swapped and replaced, Ollie has a door shut in his face, the box is taken off and a pool of water swamps the living room and the fireplace becomes a bomb site.  At last the pianola is in place, only for the professor to return home like a whirling dervish, wreck the thing in a way that recalls Stan himself in Big Business and his wife returns home and all returns to chaotic normality as the duo are sent on their way. 

            Can anything return to normal after encountering this duo?  Of course not, normality never remotely enters the equation, but that’s why we love them.  The Music Box is an almost balletic, perfectly rehearsed study in successive calamities and the inherent incompetence of this partnership.  They are an illusion unto themselves, believing themselves to be doing a good day’s work but never having a clue what it actually means.  But who would want to tell them and run the risk of losing their own sanity for the rest of their lives?  Thank God no-one ever did.

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