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best movie i've ever seen.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

this one from 1938 has it all...funny storyline, funny lines, "black magic" bits, "schizophrenic wife".....all fall down, all the way.Stan was never alerted that WW1 ended, so he dutifully stays at his post. Finally arrives back in the good ole USA and finds peace at the Old Soldier's Home. Ollie hooks up with his old pal...and happily brings him home to meet the Wife.No more needed at this time. Is it their last last classic? or a Lost classic? you decide! I think A CHUMP AT OXFORD is the last great one but CHUMP is just pure L & H.Buy this DVD!

Since I was a kid, BLOCK-HEADS was one of my favourite Laurel and Hardy feature-length movies. There's truly nothing to dislike about this one; from the opening, which paints an unusual but successfully comedic slant on the horrors of WW1, to the vintage spousal comedy which evolves when Ollie brings Stan home to tea.My favourite part of the feature, though, is the mid-section which involves the troublesome twosome climbing 13 flights of stairs in order to reach Ollie's apartment. The antics they get up to in this section are truly side-splitting, invariably involving the great James Finlayson, a brattish kid and some weird shadows. It's the stuff of comedy gold, and seeing it today I'm once again surprised at how it hasn't dated in the slightest.Inevitably, Laurel is the true star here, playing off his weird activities against Hardy's increasingly exasperated straight-man. The stuff with the hand-pipe and the glass of water are smaller gags, but in many ways I like them better than the bigger stuff. BLOCK-HEADS is an all-time comedy classic and a film I can watch over and over without getting bored.

Block-Heads (1938) **** (out of 4)WW1, 1918, Laurel and Hardy are in the trenches when the commanding officer orders Laurel to guard the place and do whatever it takes to keep it safe. Flash forward twenty years and Laurel is still there guarding the same trench unaware that the war ended two decades ago. He is eventually brought back to America and gets his picture in the paper where Hardy sees him and decides to bring him back to his place for dinner.While I haven't seen every Laurel and Hardy feature this one here is without a doubt the funniest I've seen and I'd probably go as far as calling it one of the best comedies ever made. With a short running time of under an hour, Block-Heads really doesn't have any plot to think of but instead we're treated to all sorts of wonderful site gags as well as some funny lines that kept my eyes full of tears due to how hard I was laughing. Then opening five minutes inside the trenches isn't too funny and contains some rather violent stock footage of the war but after that everything is on the up and up.Things kick off in a high gear right when the duo are reunited in a wonderful segment where Hardy thinks Laurel has lost one of his legs and insists on carrying him around.When things get back to an apartment building we get a very long segment (nearly half the film) of the two trying to climb thirteen levels of stairs and getting into all sorts of trouble including a wonderfully hilarious scene with L&H regular James Finlayson as well as a run in with Our Gang member Tommy Bond. Like other Laurel and Hardy films, the pacing is lightening fast with gags running left and right and to me, every single gag worked in this film including the mind numbing scene where the desk clerk gets a football upside his head.

Producer Hal Roach was reportedly disturbed at the increasingly bizarre endings Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy proposed for their MGM-released features of the mid/late-30s but the comedic results here more than warrant it. The feature begins making you think it will be merely a spoof of a slightly-musty WWI 'returning veteran' melodrama, then enters a strange, deceptive 'midground' number of scenes where the two are supposedly happily reunited yet must almost literally battle each other in an undercurrent of mindslips, oddball personas, switched anonymity, and a willfully ignorant understanding of lethal technology (Stan attempts to back up a loaded dump truck to help Ollie leave a parking space and instead spills a ton of dirt and refuse right on Ollie's head. The results aren't much better when Ollie--unexplainedly--soon allows him to drive the car into his home parking garage.) The film's mise en scene finally settles at the resplendent, multi-leveled apartment complex where Ollie tries to get his previously sweet and accommodating wife to fix a steak "this thick" (Ollie holds his fingers apart several inches to indicate the due process and wealth both men are implicitly entitled to) for them. But once Ollie inadvertently destroys the complex's only elevator and the two begin to create total havoc not only with several other residents but with Oliver's own wife the film is a textbook example of brilliantly refined movie comedic targeting: sweetly gentle optical fades from debris-ridden visual punch lines, well-timed and properly attenuated sound effects (the 'hiss' from Oliver's kitchen gas stove when Stan dimly attempts to try to light it is particularly dangerous sounding), public revealment of the often unglamorous politics of marriage and neighborliness, supposedly innocent bystanders turned cheerleaders of outright societal collapse and hungry for more (this IMDBer was on the floor by the time a totally innocent married woman from across the hall had been stripped of her normal clothes & wearing Ollie's pajamas had to escape her own husband by masquerading as a chair while Stan kept trying to sit on her.) Say what you will about the increasingly poisonous business relationship between Stan and Hal Roach, the film is polished looking, employs several old timers from their silent years, and I found the portrayal of the women understanding and believable, not as quaint (Marx Brothers) or bellicose (W.C. Fields) as some of the competing comedy works of that era. Hadn't seen this one in years but it proves the boys were capable of many more years of contribution with the right administrative and technical support.