I watched GREAT GUNS today... for me, it was better than BUCK PRIVATES, the film some say it's a ripoff of. Laurel & Hardy, even at this stage, > Abbott & Costello. The romantic subplot was done better in GREAT GUNS than in BUCK PRIVATES. Instead of a distraction, it fit in well. Shelia Ryan gave an especially strong performance. The acting was generally better in GREAT GUNS and it was paced better as well... maybe because The Andrews Sisters weren't around to drag things down in GREAT GUNS, as they were in BUCK PRIVATES.
If I recall correctly (I believe I read this in Scott MacGillivray's book) when Abbott & Costello were going to make
Buck Privates, they visited Stan Laurel, who suggested a scene for them which ended up in the movie (which routine it was escapes me at the moment). Then later when Laurel & Hardy made
Great Guns, Laurel remembered the scene and they did a version or variation on the same bit. Stan Laurel is said to have rarely gone to the movies so most likely he never even saw Abbott & Costello's version of the routine and may not have even known they ended up using it.
Just a couple of other random things about the L&H Fox films: One other thing which separates them from the Hal Roach films was they no longer had their regular cast of Roach character actors including James Finlayson, Charlie Hall, Mae Busch, et al. This was more or less inevitable once they changed studios (although they did get, for instance, Edgar Kennedy to appear in
Air Raid Wardens at M-G-M), but this was obviously going to affect their films in a BIG way, since these regulars were a major part of the L&H "universe." And the characters they usually played were as crazy or crazier than L&H's characters. So I think it was a factor which pretty much forced the filmmakers to approach the L&H characters differently, and it was never really the same. Another thing was the various subplots which started diluting L&H's comedy in their later feature films, but this actually had started while they were still working with Hal Roach -- again, in Scott MacGillivray's book, he quotes some remarks from Oliver Hardy which I found very interesting, to the effect that L&H had been wanting writers to give their films stories, and they were pleased that the Fox writers came through on this. Of course, looking back from a historical perspective 60 or 70 years later, many people have said L&H never needed stories or plotlines in their films, and a classic short like
Busy Bodies has no storyline at all, and yet it is considered one of their best talkie shorts.
Because L&H continued making movies into the 1940s at Fox and M-G-M, that means we now have more Laurel & Hardy films than we would if they had stopped in 1940, even if every one isn't a classic. What I don't get, and never understood, was the condemnation all the films of this era seemed to receive. It was almost as if the Sons Of The Desert was a religion, John McCabe was The Pope, and the 1940s films were beyond apochrypha, they were considered blasphemous. I remember 10 or 15 years ago someone contacting me asking what L&H I had on video, and I mentioned I had some of the Fox films if he needed them. The response was "Nooooo.....we're not supposed to watch those!" Crazy.
