It is sad to note that the majority of Laurel and Hardy's post 1940 comedies are weak, minus the Hal Roach touch that made their shorts and features of the 1930's so beloved. This is one of the rare exceptions, a comedy that doesn't make the aging team look silly and uses the art of magic to enhance their gags. Kicked out of town for vagrancy, the boys need a one-way ticket and take advantage of an ad in the newspaper for a delivery man needed to take a casket to Dayton. They don't realize that the corpse is alive, and a criminal to boot! On the train, they encounter Dante the Magician and somehow get into his act. This is where the fun really begins. The gangsters show up looking for the coffin, which somehow ends up a prop in the show. Laurel & Hardy happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Laurel (literally) ends up with egg on his face.I found myself laughing quite regularly at the series of gags and confusion with Dante's magic behind most of the visuals. Sheila Ryan, who appeared with the boys in "Great Guns", returns for this outing as Dante's assistant. The sight of Laurel and Hardy in their costumes working with Dante has the audience in stitches, as does the moment when Laurel must climb a magic rope as Hardy plays the clarinet to keep the rope standing straight up. Elisha Cook Jr. ("The Maltese Falcon") is instantly recognizable as one of the stereotypical dumb crooks. The ending is another one of the team's visual gags that will have you tearing up in laughter.

First things first - this is not a "horror-comedy" as I presumed it would be by the title. I mean, even the opening credits have the name of the film in ghoulish lettering along with the spooky image of a ghost leering down at Stan and Ollie, for crying out loud! But getting past that -- this is one of those oft-despised latter day "Fox films" that the aging team of Laurel and Hardy made after their greatest works at Hal Roach Studios. It's not as "heinous" as most critics make it out to be, but it's not one of their better forties movies either. In this one, the "boys" get released from a stay in jail and are told to leave town. So they meet up with a group of swindling crooks (one of them is played by a very young Elisha Cook Jr.) who need their help in traveling to Dayton, Ohio. The dopey plot is all over the place, but along the way there are some small chuckles to be had (the hitchhiking fiasco, the "Inflato" machine duping) and a few mildly cute slapstick gags. But things sink as the film goes on and "Dante the Magician" takes up too much screen time (he's even top billed along with Laurel and Hardy!) ** out of ****

Laurel and Hardy are bamboozled into smuggling a gangster, disguised as a corpse in a coffin, from one city to another but complications arise when the coffin is switched with a coffin used in a magician's act. This film, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, doesn't approach the charm of even their weakest feature produced by the Hal Roach Studios, but I don't think this is necessarily Laurel and Hardy's worst film. There are a few laughs, sporadic as they may be. The main problem is that the comedy is too generic, it doesn't grow out of the personas they painstaking developed over the years. One could just as easily imagine Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby doing the Indian Rope trick gag. The production values are better than the Roach films, but production value is a poor substitute for comedy. The predicament can be summed up in the casting. In this film the boys are menaced by Elisha Cook, Jr.. Don't get me wrong. I think Elisha Cook, Jr., is an terrific supporting actor, but against Humphrey Bogart, not Laurel and Hardy. The boys are better menaced by a comic heavy like Walter Long.Still, although many Laurel and Hardy fans castigate Fox and MGM for their treatment of the duo during the 1940s, I don't honestly see how it could have been much different anywhere in Hollywood. Laurel and Hardy were products of the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of screen comedy. The 1940s were the nadir of comedy. By the time "A Haunting We Will Go" hit the screens in 1942, all of the greats were all essentially gone. Chaplin was inactive, and never returned to the comedy which made him great. Harold Lloyd had retired. Buster Keaton's career was in ruins. W.C. Fields' career was over. The Marx Brothers' film career was essentially over. Even the Ritz Brothers only had two more films in them. When you look at Laurel and Hardy in the context of their peers, it is a great testimony to their popularity that their film career continued as long as it did. The 1940s would forever belong to Abbott and Costello and Bob Hope, the likes of whom would make some funny films, but decade never had the comic vitality of the 1930s.

For many years,both ATOLL K(1951)and THE BIG NOISE(1944)had reputations for being Laurel & Hardy's worst film;amongst film scholars and L & H buffs like myself,this film has definitely taken over that mantle in recent years. So why is A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO so dismal? Firstly,Laurel & Hardy the actors are not allowed to play Laurel & Hardy the characters throughout.Namely,the naive,likeable innocents they established at the Hal Roach studios are virtually non-existent;they are forced to play irritating,doltish nit-wits who we are not called to sympathise with;the exact reverse philosophy as was with their Roach films. Secondly,Fox saddles them with a tenth-rate gangster melodrama in which they would've been better off not appearing in;much of the dialogue is straight,unfunny exposition with supporting characters that are far too tough and nasty to be funny. Thirdly,Alfred Werker,a solid director of melodramas,is totally out of his depth with comedy,and it shows up starkly in this film. And finally,the title is misleading;haunting has nothing to do with the plot,and nothing of it's description turns up in the film. The only mildly amusing moments occur within a train sequence featuring Dante the magician(who easily gives the film's most assured performance);Stan & Ollie,though,look embarrassed and bored with the film's content;as they should be.It's my candidate for their worst film,and many others are beginning to agree.3 out of 10.