The Bohemian Girl (1936)

Directed by James W. Horne & Charles Rogers. Starring Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jacqueline Wells, William P. Carleton, Mae Busch, Antonio Moreno, James Finlayson, Zeffe Tilbury.

Misfired muddle of a hybrid concept: stick Laurel & Hardy into a comedic riff on the titular Irish opera (with a revised happy ending, of course). The music and comic scenarios simply don’t mix, as was almost always the case no matter the comedy teams involved in these early Hollywood enterprises (see also: the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, etc.). There’s an appreciable message of tolerance and a handful of laughs scattered about—the wine-bottling bit, the prison break by metal file—but not enough to make it worth sitting through all the singing and canoodling among blandly-developed parties. Thelma Todd makes her final film appearance here, although the notoriety of her death resulted in her part being reduced/rewritten after the fact to a cameo for the song number, “Heart of a Gypsy”.

42/100