tavm Review of A-Haunting We Will Go

A-Haunting We Will Go (1942)

A-Haunting We Will Go is pretty amusing for a Fox L & H flick

[5/10 · 27 December 2007]

Because of this Laurel and Hardy film's poor reputation, I decided to watch this with Scott MacGillivray's commentary first before seeing it without. With the commentary, I appreciated many of the visual gags like various accidents from Stan's umbrella or the entire rope trick with Stan rising and falling with it depending on Ollie's playing or not of the clarinet. Of note is that Sheila Ryan appears in her second L & H movie a year after her first with the boys, Great Guns. Also, a couple of men who bilk Stan and Ollie on the train, Richard Lane and Robert Emmett Keane, would subsequently appear with them on The Bullfighters (Lane), The Dancing Masters (Keane), and Jitterbugs (Keane). Anyone interested in African-American comics of the '40s will probably want to check this one out to see both Mantan Moreland and Wille Best as waiters on a train though Mantan makes more of an impression here when he laughs at the boys' obviously fake money they thought was real because of the machine they saw Lane and Keane make different dollar bills from that they bought. As a fan of It's a Wonderful Life, it was certainly a treat for me to see Frank Faylen (Ernie the taxi driver) try to throw L & H off the train. While Stan and Ollie do provide plenty of laughs especially in a scene concerning two telephone booths from Dante the Magician that provide some nice double exposure of them, the gangster scenes, with one of them being Elisa Cook, Jr. of The Maltese Falcon, are mostly too serious to suit a Laurel and Hardy flick. That lion segment with them was funny though. Compared to the boys' Hal Roach output, this Fox entry doesn't come close quality-wise but A-Haunting We Will Go shouldn't be considered bottom-of-the barrel either. P.S. One of the children that was admiring Dante on the train was Terry Moore, who later became the leading lady on Mighty Joe Young.