NFR Project: 'The Music Box' (1932)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Music Box’

Dir: James Parrott

Scr: H.M. Walker

Pho: Len Powers, Walter Lundin

Ed: Richard C. Courier

Premiere: April 16, 1932

29:16

Comedic perfection.

This is the quintessential Laurel and Hardy movie, one that earned an Oscar for Best Live Action Short. It deserved it. In The Music Box the comic duo has but one job to do – and they most spectacularly, hilariously, fail to do it. It’s a perfect example of the comedy of mounting frustration.

The film is a partial remake of their silent short Hats Off, now a lost film. Fortunately, the comedy team and their gag writers decided to take another shot at this location. The setting is a precariously steep stairway in Los Angeles. The objective: to get a player piano, in a wooden box complete with casters on the bottom, all the way up to a house where it is to be delivered. Can they do it?

By this time, Laurel and Hardy had firmly established their onscreen personas. Stan Laurel was the hopeless numbskull, and Oliver Hardy was his bossy superior, who was actually no brighter than his friend. Again and again they struggle to reach the top of the stairs, only to be foiled by a nurse with a baby stroller, a cop, and a pompous professor. Each time they get ahead, they lose control of the piano and down it rolls again, all the way to the bottom. (The bizarre, discordant noises the piano emits during its manhandling are hilarious in themselves.)

Hardy always gets more physical punishment than Laurel, and it is dealt in spades here. Oliver gets dragged, run over, doused with water (twice), poked in the eye with a ladder, steps on nails, and punished with jabs to the belly – he even gets a baby bottle shattered over his head. Laurel’s double- and triple-takes as this progresses are priceless, as are Hardy’s periodic disgusted takes to the camera.

When the two find themselves at the top of the hill, they are told that there was a road directly to the summit. So of course, what do our geniuses do? They carry the piano all the way to the bottom, reload it, and drive up to the house. Then comes the task of trying to get the thing inside. This they do, with the attendant results – a ruined house.

There is one sublime moment, however. They turn on the player piano and begin to pick up shattered remnants of the room, and as the music plays, they begin to dance to it. Light on their feet, they move in delightful, perfect harmony – a glimpse of sheer magic.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Red Dust.