Them Thar Hills (1934) and Tit For Tat (1935)

Laurel and Hardy won an Oscar for their short The Music Box; Tit For Tat earned their second and last nomination (they didn't win). It's actually a sequel—their only one—to a short called Them Thar Hills, from the year before.

The earlier farce featured Charlie Hall and Mae Busch as a married couple who run afoul of The Boys after they've made coffee with water contaminated by bootleg booze dumped into a well. Once again, Mr. Hardy's obliging doctor has recommended a camping vacation so Ollie's broken leg can heal in the clean mountain air. The Boys pull an Airstream trailer to a spot they think will be the perfect one at which to settle for a few days. There's even a well from which they can hoist fresh water.

What we know and they don't is that prior to their arrival, some guv'ment officers have chased away a gang of moonshiners. The miscreants, in order to fool the feds, have poured all their booze down the well and the water is loaded with several barrels of homemade who-hit-John.

Hall and Busch arrive on foot, their car having run out of gas further down the mountainside. Stan and Ollie send Charlie back with a can of gasoline. Mae stays with them and they, ever the little gentlemen, offer her a freshly brewed cup of coffee. All three of them get stinko and they don't even know it. When Charlie returns, all hell breaks loose.

In the sequel, Stan and Ollie open a new hardware store next to Charlie's grocery. The Boys want to make up and be friends, but the grocer is still angry about their previous contretemps and, in typical Laurel and Hardy fashion, a minor expression of annoyance builds to all-out combat to the death. While the three men storm back and forth between their stores, committing mayhem on each other's goods, a fella no one even knows robs the hardware store to its last widget.

Busch was a favorite in the Laurel and Hardy films. Her great moment came playing Hardy's wife in Sons of the Desert. Hall, an Englishman like Laurel, served as foil to Stan and Ollie in over two dozen films. He'd come to America as part of the same Fred Karno music hall troupe that gave us Charlie Chaplin and Laurel, who was Chaplin's understudy.

For my taste, there are more laughs in two reels of Laurel and Hardy than there are in two hours of Judd Apatow—and Tit For Tat is about 90 percent improvisation. Laurel later admitted that they began shooting with no script and so just made it all up as they went along. Ah, those were the days.

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