Sons of the Desert (1933)

(YouTube Streaming, March 2021) I remain fascinated by the difference between the idea of a well-known star when contrasted against the idea of a great film starring them. A surprising number of stars had few great movies to their names, meaning that their persona is far more important than specific works. (Brigitte Bardot, for instance — widely known as a sex-symbol even if few people can name Et Dieu créa la femme or Le Mépris as her best films, let alone any of the other 45 ones in her filmography.)  Such it is with the Laurel and Hardy comedy duo — their personas are far better known than any of their movies. If my notes are correct, Sons of the Desert is the second of their films that I’ve seen, but often mentioned as their finest. The comic premise is simple (two men lie to their wives about attending a lodge convention for recreational purposes), but the fun of the film is in seeing the lies of the premise escalate to an unsustainable level, and especially how the two lead characters react under pressure. Clocking in at a mere 68 minutes, Sons of the Desert doesn’t have a lot of room for flab — the film quickly gets going and keeps escalating the domestic frictions to the extreme. The film isn’t all slapstick — there’s plenty of verbal comedy, and perhaps the film’s best sequence has the wives watching their husbands hamming it up through newsreel footage. But it does clearly show the interplay between Laurel and Hardy at its finest, with impeccable comic timing and unspoken back-and-forth between the two performers. The look at life in suburban Los Angeles in the early-1930s is interesting and remains relatable. What hasn’t aged so well are the sexist stereotypes and wife-on-husband domestic violence toward the end of the film — even playing the dual standard for laughs isn’t much of a relief, although the viewers find refuge in the other couple that maintain that honesty is the best policy. Still, Sons of the Desert remains a strong showcase of Laurel and Hardy’s talents at feature length, and a funny movie even for those who aren’t familiar with their routine.