I watched "The Bohemian Girl" some months ago after having recorded it (together with this offering) from a TV channel which specialises in showing old black and white films and which was showing a season of Laurel and Hardy films (shorts and feature length). I was left so dismayed and downhearted at the sheer awfulness of "The Bohemian Girl" that I could not facing watching this (also the object of many adverse reviews) immediately afterwards, fearing what it would do to my standing as a fervent admirer of Laurel and Hardy for the best part of fifty years! I finally summoned up the courage to do this, however, and, most regrettably, found this to be almost as dire as "TBG"! First of all (just as with "The Girl"), there are the absolutely ghastly, atrocious and instantly forgettable third-rate songs performed by fourth-rate singers with which the film is FAR too interspersed. As soon as each song begins, you just want it to end and be over with as soon as possible so that the people who form the only possible reason for you wanting to watch this junk can appear. Equally as regrettably, however, even the appearances by the Boys are well below par and almost all of their scenes were lacking in invention, pace, new gags and even basic humour, I found. From the very first scene with them in and their drilling holes in the floor of the "cheese shop" right through to the very final scenes of "the Gypsy songs and dances" (dire, dire, dire), I just failed to find them funny and most of the gags (object falling at irregular intervals on Ollie's head, the pokes in the eye, the double-takes etc etc. were all just stale and lacking in humour. The low point of all (among many) was when they wee carrying the piano over a chasm and the "monkey" appears - just totally cringe-worthy. The ONLY scene I enjoyed was when Stan was trying to get brandy off the St Bernard -and not because of Stan, but because of the great training the DOG had obviously undergone! An experience to be forgotten as quickly as possible and for which the only antidote is a double viewing of "Sons of the Desert"!

It's kind of sad that the plot of this thing supersedes the appearances of Laurel & Hardy. Apparently, an opera singer has gone to Switzerland to hide from her domineering composer husband. I wouldn't hire these two to make a soup commercial. The music is just awful and while there are some nice gimmicks, the songs never made the Top 40 in 1938, Now the good stuff. The boys are in Switzerland selling mousetraps; the reason. There is lots of cheese so there must be lots of mice. Great. They stupidly sell their business for what appears to be a lot of money, but the notes are worthless. They eventually get a job helping out around the hotel so they can pay off the debt they have incurred by using the phony money for a very expensive meal. While moving a piano to a tree house over a rickety bridge, they are attacked by a gorilla (what the hell--oh, why not. Stan and Ollie have had trouble with pianos before. There is a neat scene where they spill soap suds into an organ and the bubble keep the sound of the notes inside of them. Watch for these things and don't worry about the plot. It is just tiresome anyway.

It's not a total washout among their feature films. It has some very fine moments - among my favorite Ollie serenading Grete Natzler with, "Let me call you Sweetheart" which Stan is playing on a tuba! There is also Stan and the St. Bernard he fools into giving him a bit of his medicinal brandy. There is also the gorilla and the boys and the piano on the swaying bridge. But the film is a wash-out when compared with SONS OF THE DESERT, WAY OUR WEST, or BLOCK-HEADS.It should have been better - it was their last attempt at an operetta format. In fact the plot deals with a composer (Walter Woolf King - "Lasparri" in A NIGHT AT THE OPERA) struggling to compose the score of his next operetta for him and his wife (Ms Natzler). Set in Switzerland, like THE BOHEMIAN GIRL the boys get into fun costumes. They are in the alps because they are mouse trap salesmen in Switzerland (because of it's cheese). They are swindled and owe a huge hotel tab. Ollie has insulted the hotel cook (Adia Kuznetzoff) who is determined to make them pay by forcing them to slave for him as busboy waiters until their bill is paid off. When they try to cheat he forces them to break more plates to replace the figures they wiped out.All this is more than promising, but structurally it is not good. This seems to be the fault of the studio owner, Hal Roach.Roach was aware that Laurel and Hardy were his biggest star attractions, and he knew that the revenue they generated might give him the chance to expand his production company. Roach did get somewhere in the late 1930s with bigger films. He produced the "Topper" films (the first with Cary Grant and Constance Bennett, as well as Roland Young), and also ONE MILLION B.C. with Carole Landis. But Roach's conservative instincts interfered with his plans here. For one thing he could not bring himself to treat Stan and Ollie as a unified bargaining unit. He had their contracts end at different dates, in an irritating attempt to keep them in check. Stan in particular had to be kept under control. So in the late 1930s Roach suggested a "Hardy Family" series with Ollie and Patsy Kelly as husband and wife, and Spanky MacFarlane as their son. It sounds interesting, but it got nowhere (one wonders if it was planned to go anywhere). He also made the feature ZENOBIA in 1939 with Laurel replaced by Harry Langdon (Langdon was working for Roach as a gag writer at the time). The boys retaliated by doing THE FLYING DEUCES with producer Boris Morros - a hint to Roach that he was equally replaceable. It was a message that Roach quickly noted, but probably resented.Secondly there was the issue of being penny wise and pound foolish. Roach kept close watch on film budgets. When Stan and Ollie made the film OUR RELATIONS, Stan was active producer on that film, and he spent money quite freely on it, especially in the sequences set in a nightclub. Compare the really realistic nightclub there with the more spartan ones shown in some of the shorts Roach controlled like BLOTTO. Roach did not care for this at all. So he looked at the script of SWISS MISS and tampered with it.In the original script, apparently, Natzler is having a marital dispute with King which involves their rival egos and his refusal to let her help him with his operetta work. She is ordered to leave. She disguises herself and becomes a maid at the hotel that Stan and Ollie are stuck working their bill off at. Ollie falls for the new maid. But so does the boys' adversary Kuznetzoff, who is furious watching Ollie trying to ingratiate himself with her. He also notes that King is trying to ingratiate himself with the maid (King recognizes Natzler, but is pretending he is in love with the "maid" to make Natzler furious and jealous). So Kuznetzoff tries to get rid of all three of them by putting a bomb in the piano that they have to carry across a swaying rope bridge to King's chalet. This part of the famous sequence was cut out by Roach, trying to cut costs and time. There is a still photo showing Stan arguing about the cut sequence, and it shows him as really angry. He was right to be angry - the sequence is still very funny with that gorilla, but it had moments of Stan and Ollie crashing into the keyboard that were meant to make the audience expect a premature explosion.For a musical it lacks any memorable tunes - unlike WAY OUT WEST with "In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia" and "We're Going to Dixie", or with THE SONS OF THE DESERT with "Honalulu Baby" or THE BOHEMIAN GIRL with "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls" (or even unlike the later THE BIG NOISE with "Maizy Doats"!). Instead, King cooks up a little ditty called "The Cricket Song" which has the opening line, "Crick, crick, crick goes the cricket...singing merrily, all day long!" Like the ridiculous conclusion of the Don Ameche biopic on Stephen Foster, wherein everyone hearing the music - supposedly - of "Old Folks At Home" for the first time sing it standing as the film ends, here the entire village is singing this ditty. At least Foster's tune was a great one. I assure you "The Cricket Song" is not!!Little else positive to add except for those few good bits I mentioned - and the brief appearances of the always welcomed Eric Blore (as King's butler). It barely rises above the bulk of the films of the 1940s for MGM and 20TH Century Fox, but enjoy it's best moments without any second thoughts.

Disappointing Laurel and Hardy film. Stan and Ollie are hilarious, of course, and their encounter with a gorilla on a rope bridge is a classic, but they're still done-in by subplots and musical numbers that command more time than their antics. Definitely worth seeing, but if you're new to the L&H cult and haven't seen it and are thinking of buying it, be advised that, despite their top billing, they are almost guest stars here.