I've been catching quite a few of Laurel and Hardy's film shorts lately, both silent and talkie, and one item of note for this picture is that there seems to be a fair amount of close-ups of the Boys that weren't standard for most of their work. This is most likely due to the limited space in which most of the story takes place, though it's not much of a story when you get right down to it. Stan and Ollie go through an inordinate amount of contortions in order to get ready to take a nap in their upper train berth. It actually gets to be very physical and I had to wonder if they might have suffered any amount of pain or bruises while falling down a small ladder or inadvertently sticking a foot in each other's face. In the meantime, the rest of the passengers on board revel in tearing each other's clothes off due to an unintended accident initiated by Stan. A lot of this was pretty standard stuff for Laurel and Hardy, and the version I saw courtesy of Turner Classics had their traditional 'Cuckoo Song' opening the program. As this is considered by many to be their first talking picture, I don't know if the Cuckoo music was there from the beginning or added later, but it was a neat reminder of the way I remembered these shorts when I was a kid watching them in the Fifties. Great memories and great to see them all over again.
Review of Berth Marks
