Door to Door Greeting Card Salesmen Nearly Get Killed
Door to door salesmen in Paris, played by Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel, console a lonely wife (Mae Busch), married to a hotheaded painter (Charles Middleton). Stan writes the verse, Oliver does the designs on greeting cards they peddle door to door. At twenty-one minutes, The Fixer Uppers is a typically wild Laurel and Hardy short (from 1935). These two often played well-meaning fellows getting into absurd and sometimes dangerous situations.
Emotionally neglected by her intense career-obsessed husband, she gets into a conversation with Laurel who tells about a "friend" who got her husband interested in her again by making him jealous with another man. The husband reignited his love for his long-suffering wife and gave the other man a lot of money. Read between the lines and it sounds like the husband paid the man to have sex with his wife. In any case, she agrees to try this and practices by instructing Laurel on how to kiss her. They stand body to body at her encouragement, kiss for ten seconds, resulting in Hardy, left out, glaring at the camera. Laurel's hat flips up by itself. At the break of the clinch, he falls backwards onto the floor. An added pop on the soundtrack indicates excitement on his part. She also collapses onto the couch, or divan as she might call it, when Stan goes for seconds. The pop happens with her too, indicating, I'm guessing, arousal. In 1935 it was just one comedic way to indicate sex without being explicit.
The husband returns when Hardy's kissing her. Played by Charles Middleton (Ming the Merciless in the Flash Gordon serials), the painter husband is a well-spoken maniac ruled by his passions. He challenges Hardy to a duel at midnight. Laurel later suggests Hardy simply not go to the duel. They pass out in a bar after drinking all evening with a man who buys all of their greeting cards. The husband's card is in Hardy's pocket, so the cops deliver him to where they think he lives: the painter's apartment. They put the two drunk men into what turns out to be the wife's bed. The couple return home. Hardy overhears the husband sounding more reasonable, agreeing with his wife to forget about the duel.
Laurel's snoring changes everything.
"What are you doing in my wife's bed?"
Running away happens soon thereafter, with pratfalls and never discussed injuries.
The kissing scene between Laurel and Mae Busch, with Hardy's asides to the camera, tightened my chest muscles with a solid minute of laughter accompanied by wet eyes.
Good to laugh like that sometimes.
Vic Neptune
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