Laurel & Hardy: Busy Bodies

Carpenters drive to and “work” at a planing mill. Relying heavily on pantomime (Stan speaks only 24 words!), as well as violent but unhurried slapstick, this rates as one of the team’s finest shorts. When fans wrote to Laurel late in life and asked for recommendations, he would often say BUSY BODIES and TOWED IN A HOLE. Curiously they were made within a year of one another, and have the same tructure — Laurel & Hardy, dressed in overalls, start out in an open car, driving to work, where their construction labors are unsupervised nonsense, and they wreck everything, including their even-then antique flivver for the finish. Directed by Lloyd French. With Charlie Hall.