Clevercell Very disappointing...

Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

AutCuddly Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

mark.waltz Laurel is concerned for the bed-bound hospital patient Oliver, suffering from a broken leg. If he really thought it through, he'd show his concern by staying away, not showing up with a paper bag and proclaiming his gift in the most delightful way. But hard boiled eggs and nuts are not the equivalent to a spoonful of sugar, and before you can say, "Another Fine Mess!", Oliver's in more danger than just risking another broken leg. He's hanging out of the hospital window, and Laurel is panicking in order to try and save him. This is certainly one of the boy's funniest shorts, up there with "Brats" and "Twice Two", if not the award winning quality of "The Music Box". You can see why that in the early 1930's, Laurel and Hardy were at the top of their game, going from silent to sound, from shorts to features, and having a career that refused to give up the ghost long after they needed to step back and take a breather. The comparisons to Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton visual comedy is obvious here, but its still very funny, and the innocent charm of these two clowns make their comedy timeless today more than 80 years later.

Robert J. Maxwell Nicely done short. Hardy is laid up in the hospital with a foot swollen with gout. Laurel visits him and turns the room into a shambles. At one point, Hardy is hanging from the ceiling by his injured leg while the doctor, Billy Gilbert, is hanging on to the other end of the rope outside the window. They seesaw back and forth.When the wreckage settles and the smoke clears, Laurel sits on a syringe full of sedative and when he tries to drive Hardy home he falls asleep at the wheel. Rear projection has the old Model T Ford swiveling around in the middle of speeding traffic, sliding backwards, and so on.Interesting the way that Laurel's cries of distress differ from those of Hardy. Laurel's are almost feminine shrieks, while Hardy's are the full-throated ululations of a terrified animal, perhaps some kind of bovine.If you like Laurel and Hardy at all, you'll surely like this one.

naseby This short shows the confined area to which it was, namely that poor Ollie actually enjoys the peace and quiet, never mind his broken foot, in his bed of pain at the County Hospital. Stan 'decides' to visit him,as 'he's nothing better to do!' That's the sarcastic line Ollie gives back to him, after he leaves Ollie's peace in tatters, assaults the doctor's dignity and almost kills him, cuts up another patient's trousers and brings Ollie 'hard boiled eggs and nuts' instead of candy or fruit etc. "You didn't pay me for the last box I brought you." says Stan after Ollie's enquiry why he didn't bring the candy!Altogether,it was one of their shorts that had a thin-ish outline, but was filled fairly well considering. It had the odd finale of Stan sitting on a syringe/sedative intended for another patient. The nurses casually mention to themselves in fits of laughter, that Stan will sleep for a month. Strangely not telling him in Hollywood licence style - so of course, when Ollie is prematurely struck off (Because Stan has wrecked the place) the latter drives him home, well almost - sleeping at the wheel, swerving and near-missing everything. It ends with their car bent round in a semi-circle shape, as a policeman tells them to pull over. They can't as because of the shape of the car, it drives around in a circle!As I say, a shallow type of tale, with Stan visiting Ollie in hospital, but nonetheless, it delivers the calamitous Stan in the style we knew was coming Ollie's way!

Randy Skretvedt "County Hospital" is a perfectly fine L&H short until the final sequence. I always enjoyed the scenes where Stan roams the hospital halls looking for his buddy (trying to figure out what a "solarium" is) and accidentally wanders into the maternity ward; he's mightily relieved when he finds out he's on the wrong floor! I also very much enjoy Ollie's scenes with doctor Billy Gilbert and silly Englishman William Austin. The film is also enlivened by the nurses, played by Estelle Etterre (who laughs hysterically when she finds that Stan has accidentally injected himself with a sedative) and May Wallace (who joins in the laughter and says, "He'll sleep for a month!" -- so much for medical ethics). Personally, I always liked the scene where Dr. Gilbert is flung out the window of Ollie's room on the top floor--it adds a little action to a film where the longest scene is a single take of Stan trying to eat a hard-boiled egg. Also, the gag with the egg dropping into an unseen container by Ollie's bed and making a metallic clunk is NOT a mistake--the joke is that we think at first the egg has dropped into a chamber pot (ask your grandparents what that is), but as Stan brings it up into view we're relieved to see it's only a pitcher. The same gag happens in the team's earlier short "Helpmates," where Stan drops an alarm clock into an unseen container under his bed.As for the final sequence with the back projection, it's not so much the quality of the film running behind the boys as a problem of sluggish editing. If the shots had been much shorter--and if we'd had a few more cutaways outdoors than just the one of the car skidding on a wet road--the sequence might have worked. Roy Seawright, who did the special effects scenes at Roach's, was a good friend of mine and his crew generally did top-notch work-- check out the split-screen scenes in "Our Relations" and "Brats," the animated bubbles in "Swiss Miss," and all of the effects work in Hal Roach's feature "Topper."