Watch County Hospital For Free

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

I've probably seen this Laurel & Hardy short more than any other. I watched it with my dad in the early Fifties. I have to admit, I really felt for Oliver in this one. He is really in bad shape and his good buddy comes along and ruins it for him. From the beginning when Stanley brings him a gift of some hard boiled eggs and some nuts, it's all over. Stan causes so much trouble that they are both thrown out of the hospital. After several harrowing moments, Stan sits on a hypodermic needle that contains a sedative. Of course, he has to drive Oliver home. There is a great line when Oliver asks his friend why he didn't bring a box of candy. He says Ollie never paid him for the last one.

Nicely done short. Hardy is laid up in the hospital with a foot swollen with gout. Laurel visits him and turns the room into a shambles. At one point, Hardy is hanging from the ceiling by his injured leg while the doctor, Billy Gilbert, is hanging on to the other end of the rope outside the window. They seesaw back and forth.When the wreckage settles and the smoke clears, Laurel sits on a syringe full of sedative and when he tries to drive Hardy home he falls asleep at the wheel. Rear projection has the old Model T Ford swiveling around in the middle of speeding traffic, sliding backwards, and so on.Interesting the way that Laurel's cries of distress differ from those of Hardy. Laurel's are almost feminine shrieks, while Hardy's are the full-throated ululations of a terrified animal, perhaps some kind of bovine.If you like Laurel and Hardy at all, you'll surely like this one.

The film builds nicely through the first 15 minutes, and then peters out with that unconvincing back-projection method for the street scene. I have to wonder how Mr. Laurel allowed that. It must have killed him to see that in the editing room.The climactic gag involving the traction line is their very best from the sound era. (The best gag sequence from the silent era was the parade of mangled cars in Two Tars). The gag sequence following later, with the pants, was the perfect follow-on. Very funny, but not so much as to wear you out like the previous gag.This really is a must-see.When I show this to my friends, I warn them about the weak ending sequence, and then they relax and embrace the rest of it gladly.

When the Lumiere brothers first started exhibiting motion pictures in the 1890's, one of their first subjects was train coming into a train station. Their audience dashed for the exits, feeling the train would run them over. This seems silly to us now but it gives an indication of the adjustments to our thinking that are necessary to enjoy a film.At the end of "County Hospital" there is a singularly ineffective sequence involving a wild car ride through crowded city streets: Laurel is driving but is falling asleep due to a misplaced hypodremic needle. Oliver is in the back seat and can do nothing but hope for the best. The entire scene is back-projected, save for one shot of the car skidding and twisting around on an oil slick on what appears to be a suburban street with no traffic: then we go back to the crowded city street being projected behind the boys. It's not wild at all because it's totally unreal, like a carnival ride. In the old silent days, (before there were unions and ordinances against filing dangerous stunts on the streets), this would have been done much better.Today it looks ridiculous and has no comic impact at all, except for the amusing ending where the car had been punched into an L-shape that can only go around in circles. But was it seen differently then? Did 1932 audiences look at this and accept it at face value and thus find it funnier than it looks today? These days, almost no back projection is used because we've trained our eyes to recognize it. (The sequence with Grace Kelly and Cary Grant in "To Catch a Thief" doesn't work as well now as it must have in 1955 for this reason).Frankly, I like L&H's verbal humor more than their physical humor. They were among the first comics to create humor through their personalities rather than the crude slapstick that had dominated the silent cinema and this was accommodated, rather than inhibited, by sound.