A HAUNTING WE WILL GO(1942)Written January-March 1942. Filmed March-April 1942. Produced by Sol M. Wurtzel (20th Century Fox). Directed by Alfred L. Werker. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Dante the Magician (Harry A. Jansen), Elisha Cook Jr. STORY: Laurel and Hardy take a job transporting a coffin to Ohio, unaware that it contains one of Fox Studios' ubiquitous gangsters, who thinks this is the only way to travel. The coffin gets mixed up with a prop coffin belonging to Dante the Magician, who hires the Boys for his act. Eventually it all gets sorted out to everyone's satisfaction, except for the guy in the coffin who gets shot to death somewhere along the line. |
From 1940 to 1942, when the Boys were working on their first two movies at Fox, they found time to make several stage appearances and join a couple of tours, including the amazing Hollywood Victory Caravan. These years could be considered the beginning of their eventual career shift from movie stars to live performers. |
See the "But Wait - There's More"
button at the bottom of this page for more information about The Hollywood Victory Caravan and more. |
JB:
Halfway through A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO, Dante the Magician hires Laurel
and Hardy as his assistants, figuring the Boys "could provide some
laughs in the show." Sad to say, predicting the
future was
not one of Dante's magical talents.
The most tedious feature the Boys ever
made, A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO is proof that the popular slogan "Movies
Are Your Best Entertainment" is not meant to be an all-encompassing
statement. About a half hour into this mistitled, misguided movie, you
will find an actual Laurel and Hardy-style gag. Backstage at
a
rehearsal of a magic show, Stan accidentally hits Ollie on the head
with a sandbag. Through Ollie's own stupidity, he manages to
get
himself hit on the head again a second later. Then he looks
at
the camera and registers annoyance, just like the old days.
Look
quick for this scene, because it is just about the only time the real
Laurel and Hardy show up in the whole movie.
This movie is less
about Laurel and
Hardy and more about a gaggle of gangsters, one of them played by
character actor Elisha Cook, Jr., who had been in the superb THE
MALTESE FALCON for Warner Brothers the previous year. The
tough
lowlifes at Roach, such as Walter Long or Leo Willis, were always
effective at intimidating Laurel and Hardy. But in this film,
the
Boys have nothing to fear - these thugs with dirty mugs are about as
menacing as Hilary Duff selling chocolate chip cookies for the Save the
Kittens foundation. And they're stupid to boot.
Three of
the gangsters endlessly confront Laurel and Hardy and threaten them
with violence, yet time and again walk away with nothing. Having
thoroughly convinced the Boys that they are just college students up to
some prank, one of them suddenly pulls a gun. A little while
later, the gangsters scowlingly vow not to let each other out of their
sights, yet seconds later, one of them says "We better split up" and so
they do without a second thought. Not long after that, Laurel
and
Hardy are trapped on stage, with gangsters in the wings, holdings
guns. But when the Boys exit the stage, there are no
gangsters to
be found anywhere. They just wandered away. Elisha Cook, Jr.
has
even made a special trip up a flight of spiral stairs, apparently
looking for Laurel and Hardy, whom he had just had trapped on stage not
two minutes before! Never has Attention Deficit Syndrome in
Gangsters been displayed so vividly in a motion picture.
Dante the Magician,
a well-respected
artist who gets co-billing with Laurel and Hardy, looks like he's
enjoying himself when he's around the Boys. But it must be asked: if
you have a world-class magician and history's greatest comedy team as
your stars, why are you eating up so much footage following the
mindless frivolities of a bunch of brain-dead hooligans?
What could be a decent comedy
setup -
Stan and Ollie as Dante's assistants - never gets developed much beyond
saddling Stan and Ollie with turbans and balloon pants, as if funny
costumes were an adequate substitute for real comedy. Despite
Dante's prodigious talents, there is very little real magic on display
here. He amuses some children on a train with a couple of table top
tricks, and later does a levitation routine that appears to be filmed
without any trick photography. But once he starts his act on
a
huge, ornately decorated set, Dante is mostly confined to his own
circle of Hell, allowed only a few brief cutaways where he barely gets
a chance to perform some simple closeup stuff before the camera
inevitably pans to other infinitely less-appealing characters. Most of
the other "magic" in this film comes from editing and special effects,
rendering the casting of someone of Dante's stature completely
meaningless. The only scene of this kind worth watching occurs when
Stan keeps entering one prop phone booth and emerging from
another. Well-played by the Boys, it is a solid minute of
good
fun, especially when Ollie opens one booth only to confront himself
popping out to say "Can't I have a little privacy?". But Stan
and
Ollie helping Dante with the "Indian rope trick" barely passes as a
comedy scene, and the film's final gag, where Stan appears out of a
prop egg, reduced in size, only serves as a visual reminder of how much
the real Stan Laurel had been reduced in stature since leaving Hal
Roach.
A-HAUNTING WE WILL
GO is always at odds
with itself - it wants to be a gangsteriffic mystery and a magical
Laurel and Hardy comedy at the same time. But the gangster
story
is dull, and, in its desperate effort to work the Boys into the story,
too illogically plotted (seriously, is traveling in a coffin really the
best way to move about incognito?). And yet, once the Boys have entered
the story, they not only have to work against
a script which
contains few genuine gags but also against the kind of slow-moving,
depressingly macabre atmosphere that provides the least fertile soil on
which to grow good Laurel and Hardy comedy.
If Bob Dylan was
right when he sang
"There's no success like failure", then HAUNTING is a resounding
success. But I doubt that's what Bobby D. meant.
Botton line: watch THE MALTESE
FALCON. Sim Sala Bim!
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for information on
Laurel and Hardy's appearances on stage in the early 1940s.