Swiss Miss (1938)
Directed by John G. Blystone, Hal Roach

Film Review

After Laurel and Hardy's best film, Way Out West (1937) came what is widely considered their worst.  Swiss Miss is an extraordinary sidewards step into mediocrity for a comedy duo who were at their creative peak.  You get the impression that producer Hal Roach had, by this stage, completely lost confidence in Stan and Ollie's ability to carry a feature by themselves, and so we have to endure a yawn-inducing secondary storyline about a dull opera singer and her even duller husband.  Five tedious minutes into the film, you begin to wonder whether our comedy heroes are ever going to appear.  If you watch this film on video or DVD, I bet you will not be able to resist the urge to indulge in a bit of judicial editing, fast-forwarding past all the bits in which Stan and Ollie are absent.  (I've done that and, believe me, it makes a much better film.)

After working together for over a decade, the relationship between Roach and his two leading men was in terminal decline by the time Swiss Miss went into production.  Stan Laurel was growing increasingly resentful of Roach's interference, particularly in the editing - something which is painfully evident in this film.  Roach vetoed a potentially good gag (a bomb in the piano) and excised what may have been the best number in the film, a comedy duet sung by Stan and Ollie in the cheese-maker's shop.   The producer knew that he still had two bankable stars but was finding it increasingly difficult to fit them into the kind of films he wanted to make, and so the rift was inevitable.

Swiss Miss was Hal Roach's attempt to emulate MGM's Night at the Opera (1935), the phenomenonally successful film that kick-started the Marx Brothers' career after the failure of Duck Soup (1933) and their departure from Paramount.  Roach's misguided belief was that if you gave the audience more variety, the viewing experience would be enhanced.  As it turned out, more did not mean better.  Who, having paid to watch a Laurel and Hardy film, would want to sit through the tedious domestic antics of a pompous composer and his equally unsympathetic wife?  The musical numbers are attractively staged but are mere gloss to what is a shallow and unenjoyable film.

The film's biggest failing is that it singularly fails to capitalise on the talent of its two stars.  Stan and Ollie are practically reduced to the daft caricatures that they would later become in their films for MGM and Twentieth Century Fox.  Consequently, their comedy routines largely fall flat and fail to elicit much more than a chortle, in marked contrast to their previous films in which they could be relied upon to reduce an audience to hysterics.  The sequence in which Stan cons a Saint-Bernard into surrendering its flask of brandy is amusing but out of character, whilst the one in which Stan and Ollie attempt to transport a piano across a rope bridge is painful to watch, because it has absolutely no sense of reality and is just plain silly.  And as for the man in the monkey suit...

Thankfully, Hal Roach learned from his experiences on this film and would be considerably more hands off in his subsequent L&H films.  Swiss Miss was an unfortunate aberration from which Stan and Ollie soon recovered, although their association with Roach was soon to come to an end...

Film Synopsis

Mousetrap salesmen Stan and Ollie arrive in Switzerland, believing that they will have more success selling their wares in a country that is renowned for its cheese, since more cheese presumably means more mice.  The theory appears to be vindicated when they manage to sell their entire stock to a cheese-maker, although they do not realise they have been paid with fake money.   The boys celebrate their success with a slap-up meal at a classy hotel, but when it becomes apparent that they have no real money they end up in the kitchen washing dishes.  Ollie then falls for an attractive young woman, Anna, not knowing that she is a famous opera singer and wife to Victor, a renowned composer.  The latter had hoped to shut himself away in the hotel so that he can work on his next opera, but Anna cannot keep away from him, since she is determined to play the leading role in the opera...