Cinema Revisited: The Dancing Masters (1943)

By the 1940s, Laurel and Hardy were in their 50s. Being older and less spry, the boys weren’t engaging in a lot of knockabout gags anymore. Plus, comedy itself had changed. During the war years, it wasn’t slow, methodical slapstick, it was the rat-a-tat verbal humor of current superstars Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope. So, Laurel and Hardy adapted. Some fans believe they stopped being funny in 1940 because they weren’t the same old Stan and Ollie from the silent era and the 1930s. But, truly, Laurel and Hardy adapted successfully and never lost the heart of their comedy.

The Dancing Masters was made for 20th Century Fox, and it features the boys trying to help a new inventor who is getting a hostile reaction, especially from his girlfriend’s father who is also his boss, and who would prefer his daughter take up with a sniveling yes-man who works for him. The result is one of the duo’s funnier comedies from this period in their career.

First Stan and Ollie are dance instructors, and the opening scenes exhibit Ollie’s delightful agility – now past 50 but dancing merrily with his young lady students, including doing a hula instruction while wearing a grass skirt. Stanley teaches ballet, which allows his opening scenes to be as much fun. He places his foot on the wall after stepping in some glue, and has to be extricated, taking much of the wall with him.

The boys fumble with gadgets in a home that changes a bookcase into a fully stocked bar. They pose as a professor and his interpreter to present their friend’s new ray gun to his girlfriend’s father as a potential investor, and end up shooting a hole in his house. And through all of this we have Stan’s struggles with the English language (“the harder they fall, the bigger I am!”) and Ollie’s hilariously disgusted looks to the camera.

Two of the film’s biggest highlights are from earlier Laurel and Hardy films. In one, they agree to continue bidding at an auction for a woman who wants to run home and get more money. Of course they end up having to purchase the item, a grandfather clock. As they try to carry it across the street, they put it down when Stan trips and loses his hat, and it is run over. This bit was also done in their 1935 short comedy Thicker Than Water.

In the other highlight, Hardy has taken an insurance policy on Laurel and tries to set him up to get hurt. Of course, these always backfire on him: when Ollie throws a banana peel on the ground, it is he who slips on it, etc. This is from their silent The Battle of the Century.

The film ends with a wild climax where Ollie is stuck on a runaway bus that goes flying up a roller coaster. The in-studio back-projection looks pretty obvious in these days of CGI effects, but the editing and Ollie’s reactions carry the scene beautifully. Throw in Stan stumbling into a carnival game where he sticks his head out and is bombarded by thrown baseballs, and The Dancing Masters ends with a lot of laughs.

Bob Bailey and Trudy Marshall are effective as the romantic couple without distracting from the comedy. Margaret Dumont delightfully appears, and Robert Mitchum shows up as a gangster, marking some territory very early in his film career.

The Dancing Masters is a good example of how Laurel and Hardy remained funny even as they aged, and the cultural dynamic of screen comedy changed. They can handle dialog, overcome romantic sub-plots, and create a very funny movie the breezes by in a pleasant 63 minutes. When it was first released, The Dancing Masters was the third highest grossing film for 20th Century Fox. It was also the 20th highest grossing film for the year 1943.

This film is available on DVD in a set of films from their later period.