A-Haunting We Will Go (1942)

*Spoiler/plot- A Haunting We Will Go, 1942, 'The Boys' get innocently involved with some crooks and con-men. They have to get 'out of town' and do it while escorting a coffin to another town by rail for money. This job becomes a shady way a gang of crooks take advantage of the new townspeople with another 'con'.*Special Stars- Laurel and Hardy, Dick Lane, Elisha Cook Jr. "Dante the Magician".*Theme- Spooky things happen around stage magicians and crooks.*Trivia/location/goofs- Dante the Magician was doing street magic and got cast in this film. This Columbia Studios film was one that was considered a 'lesser' Larual and Hardy comedy due to not be made at Hal Roach Studios.*Emotion- A quite different film due to its director's serious premise of this being a mystery film instead of a Laurel and Hardy comedy. It lacks some of the classic comedy plot and on camera antics because the writers didn't know what worked for this great comedy duo. Still good to enjoy.

First things first - this is not a "horror-comedy" as I presumed it would be by the title. I mean, even the opening credits have the name of the film in ghoulish lettering along with the spooky image of a ghost leering down at Stan and Ollie, for crying out loud! But getting past that -- this is one of those oft-despised latter day "Fox films" that the aging team of Laurel and Hardy made after their greatest works at Hal Roach Studios. It's not as "heinous" as most critics make it out to be, but it's not one of their better forties movies either. In this one, the "boys" get released from a stay in jail and are told to leave town. So they meet up with a group of swindling crooks (one of them is played by a very young Elisha Cook Jr.) who need their help in traveling to Dayton, Ohio. The dopey plot is all over the place, but along the way there are some small chuckles to be had (the hitchhiking fiasco, the "Inflato" machine duping) and a few mildly cute slapstick gags. But things sink as the film goes on and "Dante the Magician" takes up too much screen time (he's even top billed along with Laurel and Hardy!) ** out of ****

Until a few years ago, I've kept far away from Laurel & Hardy's notoriously poor 1940s vehicles produced by Twentieth-Century Fox; now that I've watched them all (and only NOTHING BUT TROUBLE [1944], made at MGM, remains from this sorry final period of the greatest comedy team in cinema history), I can say that this one is certainly the weakest of the lot! There is very little typical material for the stars who, in any case, look tired and visibly disinterested throughout; that said, it's mercifully short and, therefore, not exactly painful to watch - as was the case with, say, UTOPIA (1951), an embarrassing mess that, regrettably, proved to be their cinematic swan-song - but, at the end of the day, it's not the boys' usually endearing and irresistible routines that are remembered, if at all, but rather the scenes involving an elderly magician that goes by the unlikely name of Dante...not to mention the dubious novelty of watching Elisha Cook Jr. in drag! To add insult to injury, the film's title is a ludicrous misnomer!!

This is one of laurel and hardy's most underappreciated films. The scene where Stan climbs a rope in a magic trick is one of the funniest things i have ever seen. There are some great lines too - "Let's go to Florida. I'm dying for an orange". Priceless.