Laurel & Hardy: Slipping Wives

Laurel & Hardy: Slipping Wives
Priscilla Dean is feeling unwanted by her husband and hires Stan Laurel as her paramour to make her husband jealous. Unfortunately for Stan, the couple's butler, Oliver Hardy, takes an immediate dislike to the dimwitted rival, making his life miserable.
Customer Review: A solid pre-teaming short
This is one of Stan and Ollie's earliest pre-teaming shorts, where they were in the same film but not really acting as a team or even put in the same short on purpose. Here they have more interaction and scenes together than they do in a number of their other pre-teaming shorts. Top billing goes to Priscilla Dean. She was one of the top stars at Universal Studios in the Teens and early Twenties, but her star was fading by the time this came along. Hal Roach put a number of fading stars in comedy shorts while their names were still well-known and recognised, kind of giving them a home, however decreased in stature they were by then, until their careers permanently fizzled out. (Probably the best-known star who came to work for Hal Roach Studios under those circumstances was Mae Busch, who is now better-known for her work in L&H comedies than for the features she made when she was a big star earlier in the Twenties.) This short, which was later remade in 1935 as 'The Fixer-Uppers,' concerns a woman who is really hurt and upset that her husband is getting bored of her and not showing her as much affection. Together with a male friend of hers, she conspires to hire a man to make love to her in her husband's presence to make him jealous. (That phrase had a somewhat different connotation back when this short was made; it obviously doesn't mean what it does today, otherwise the censors would have come down on them very severely!) That man turns out to be Stan, who has come to paint the house. He is quite adamant that he doesn't want any part of this plot, but he is forced to wash up, change into nice clothes, and put on the charade of being an important man of letters. Meanwhile the butler (Oliver Hardy) doesn't like what he's seeing, and Stan spends much of the film trying to get away from the woman's seduction attempts. He believes she's cheating on her husband with the other guy who's hanging around the house, and this leads to a classic case of confused identities that eventually all works out for the good. It's not perhaps an ideal introduction to the boys, but it is pretty solid, funny, and underrated, and not one of their pre-teaming shorts that you'd recommend staying away from until you're more of a fan either.