Topic: Twice Two (1933) - Laurel and Hardy

[metaldams]

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      Hands down my least favorite thing Stan and Ollie did at Hal Roach.  I even like the Fox features better, which as a group are underrated.  Meeting The Boy King at MGM?  Well....that may be worse.  Point is this one's a turkey and I really have very little to say.  I've made it known drag comedy has never been a favorite genre of mine.  The two supposed greatest comedies of all time, both drag comedies in SOME LIKE IT HOT and TOOTSIE, while better than this, have never ranked high for me.  You can find my review for SELF MADE MAIDS and you'll see that's my least favorite original Howard-Fine-Howard short.  Stan's female voice is especially high pitched and annoying, and I find the whole concept distracting to let go in the moment and enjoy this one - so I'm not the best person to review.

      I will say this, there is one good moment in this short, and it involves Stan being Stan.  There's about one minute later in the short where the male Stan does a silent pantomime gag involving a bow tie, napkin, and some butter.  It's the kind of thing Chaplin did well as did Stan, and he does a fine job here.  It's a moment of much needed silence and creativity in a film that to me feels like a ton of white noise.

[Paul Pain]

The worst part of this crapfest is that it's a 20 minute film... 5 minutes alone is enough.  Supposedly Stan and Ollie's voices were dubbed in female voices.  Great moments, but overall a dissatisfying film both for the content and the "cast."

[Umbrella Sam]

While this short isn’t anywhere near being good, I can safely say that it is not my least favorite, as it doesn’t feature anything as horrifying as the Walter Long sequences in ANY OLD PORT and doesn’t feel like it’s 2 hours long like in BERTH MARKS (which is my candidate for the worst Laurel and Hardy film). That being said...yeah, there is very little to like about this one.

The idea of having two Laurels and two Hardys in the same film isn’t necessarily a bad one, but this short doesn’t really take advantage of the concept. The later OUR RELATIONS did this much better, using it as a way for them to wreak havoc on the world around them and cause numerous understandings. Here, you’ve basically got an idea that could have been done well with the regular Laurel and Hardy, especially since it uses gags that were done better in other shorts. Laurel and Hardy interact with their wives for the most part, rather than with their sisters, which would have truly been a good way to take advantage of the concept. The only real interesting part of the double exposure is briefly seeing Stan and his sister interact when Stan first enters the house.

I suppose I can give this short credit for having some fairly funny scenes at the office, though these are again routines that were done better elsewhere. May Wallace is actually pretty fitting for Mrs. Laurel’s voice, though Carol Tevis’ Mrs. Hardy voice is rather annoying and definitely is the reason why this short is a chore to sit through (on a side note, several online sources claim that Tevis was the voice of Minnie Mouse, but this is untrue; Marcellite Garner exclusively did the voice in the 1930s cartoons).

Really, I can’t think of much more to say. This is just another one of those shorts that tried something different but failed at it.

4 out of 10

[Big Chief Apumtagribonitz]

I like Mrs. Laurel's asthma.  Also, I've seen a still from this one where Hardy's tattoo is visible.

[Dr. Mabuse]

Perhaps the weakest Laurel and Hardy short. "Twice Two" wants to be another "Brats," but the results are more irritating than funny. Stan and Ollie were perfectly capable of doing the wives' voices, which makes the dubbing all the more regrettable.

4/10

[Tony Bensley]

Perhaps the weakest Laurel and Hardy short. "Twice Two" wants to be another "Brats," but the results are more irritating than funny. Stan and Ollie were perfectly capable of doing the wives' voices, which makes the dubbing all the more regrettable.

4/10

I'm not recalling Ollie's female vocal takes, at the moment, but a definite yes for Stan, particularly his "Agnes" in ANOTHER FINE MESS (1930).  That said, the wives voices do kind of work for me, especially May Wallace dubbing for "Mrs. Laurel,"  as I think she effectively captures Oliver Hardy's vocal inflections.

TWICE TWO (1933) is definitely not a L&H favorite, but I still find it enjoyable.

CHEERS! 

[metaldams]

I watched this one recently as it’s on the blu ray set.  I still can’t remotely get into this one, as much as I wish I could.

[HomokHarcos]

I think this was another film to kind of show off the multiple roles they could play. They probably thought of Brats and decided to do something similar where they also play their own sisters. The main joke is obviously supposed to be that they are married to each other's sibling. As Umbrella Sam noted though the way the story is the two women leads could have been played by other women, as unlike in Our Relations the siblings being mistaken for each other is not the main part of the comedy. The Three Stooges did a very similar short to this one.