mark.waltz It is sad to note that the majority of Laurel and Hardy's post 1940 comedies are weak, minus the Hal Roach touch that made their shorts and features of the 1930's so beloved. This is one of the rare exceptions, a comedy that doesn't make the aging team look silly and uses the art of magic to enhance their gags. Kicked out of town for vagrancy, the boys need a one-way ticket and take advantage of an ad in the newspaper for a delivery man needed to take a casket to Dayton. They don't realize that the corpse is alive, and a criminal to boot! On the train, they encounter Dante the Magician and somehow get into his act. This is where the fun really begins. The gangsters show up looking for the coffin, which somehow ends up a prop in the show. Laurel & Hardy happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and Laurel (literally) ends up with egg on his face.I found myself laughing quite regularly at the series of gags and confusion with Dante's magic behind most of the visuals. Sheila Ryan, who appeared with the boys in "Great Guns", returns for this outing as Dante's assistant. The sight of Laurel and Hardy in their costumes working with Dante has the audience in stitches, as does the moment when Laurel must climb a magic rope as Hardy plays the clarinet to keep the rope standing straight up. Elisha Cook Jr. ("The Maltese Falcon") is instantly recognizable as one of the stereotypical dumb crooks. The ending is another one of the team's visual gags that will have you tearing up in laughter.

hausrathman Laurel and Hardy are bamboozled into smuggling a gangster, disguised as a corpse in a coffin, from one city to another but complications arise when the coffin is switched with a coffin used in a magician's act. This film, produced by Twentieth Century Fox, doesn't approach the charm of even their weakest feature produced by the Hal Roach Studios, but I don't think this is necessarily Laurel and Hardy's worst film. There are a few laughs, sporadic as they may be. The main problem is that the comedy is too generic, it doesn't grow out of the personas they painstaking developed over the years. One could just as easily imagine Abbott and Costello or Bob Hope and Bing Crosby doing the Indian Rope trick gag. The production values are better than the Roach films, but production value is a poor substitute for comedy. The predicament can be summed up in the casting. In this film the boys are menaced by Elisha Cook, Jr.. Don't get me wrong. I think Elisha Cook, Jr., is an terrific supporting actor, but against Humphrey Bogart, not Laurel and Hardy. The boys are better menaced by a comic heavy like Walter Long.Still, although many Laurel and Hardy fans castigate Fox and MGM for their treatment of the duo during the 1940s, I don't honestly see how it could have been much different anywhere in Hollywood. Laurel and Hardy were products of the 1920s and 1930s, the golden age of screen comedy. The 1940s were the nadir of comedy. By the time "A Haunting We Will Go" hit the screens in 1942, all of the greats were all essentially gone. Chaplin was inactive, and never returned to the comedy which made him great. Harold Lloyd had retired. Buster Keaton's career was in ruins. W.C. Fields' career was over. The Marx Brothers' film career was essentially over. Even the Ritz Brothers only had two more films in them. When you look at Laurel and Hardy in the context of their peers, it is a great testimony to their popularity that their film career continued as long as it did. The 1940s would forever belong to Abbott and Costello and Bob Hope, the likes of whom would make some funny films, but decade never had the comic vitality of the 1930s.

Raymond Valinoti, Jr. In this film, some thugs hired Laurel and Hardy to transport a coffin containing a live thug to Dayton, Ohio in order to claim an inheritance. But the coffin is mixed up with another used in Dante the Magician's stage act with bizarre results.As a crime drama, A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO is fine, conveying a ominous, suspenseful aura. As a Laurel and Hardy film, however, it is lousy. The grim gangster milieu is inappropriate for Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's clownish characters. Most of the supporting actors are too humorless and realistic to successfully interact with the Boys. In the Hal Roach films, supporting actors like James Finlayson and Charlie Hall worked well with Laurel and Hardy because they performed in a farcical, larger-than-life manner.What hurts this film even more is the scenario's contemptuous treatment of Laurel and Hardy's characters. At the Hal Roach lot, where they peaked, Laurel and Hardy became popular because even though audiences laughed at their blunders, the characters conveyed a sweet innocence that endeared moviegoers. In A HAUNTING WE WILL GO, the Boys are a pair of stupid jerks undeserving of respect or sympathy. A particularly revealing moment is when romantic lead John Shelton, who is working with Laurel and Hardy in the Dante the Magician's act, chastises them for misunderstanding the magician's props. The audience is supposed to share Shelton's disdain of Laurel and Hardy's ineptitude.Dante, a magician in real life, gets to perform some tricks. Unfortunately, a levitation stunt passed off as his own actually seems to have been devised by the film's special effects department. Without meaning to belittle Dante's talents, one must say that when geniuses like Laurel and Hardy are in a film, who needs magic acts?So far, I have only seen one other film Laurel and Hardy made after leaving Hal Roach, THE DANCING MASTERS. That film wasn't bad. But despite a few isolated laughs, A-HAUNTING WE WILL GO deserves its poor reputation among film comedy historians. For Laurel and Hardy completists, it's only worth seeing once.

G.Spider Laurel and Hardy agree to transport a coffin containing a corpse. But after it becomes mixed up with a stage magician's coffin, Stan and Ollie end up as magician's assistants and find themselves entangled with gangsters who were smuggling one of their number in the coffin.This is often unfairly dismissed as a turkey. It isn't one of L & H's greatest films, but it contains plenty of memorable points including a hilarious Indian rope trick as well as the duo being fooled into buying a 'money-making machine', Ollie hiding in a box which turns out to be a stage prop used in the 'death of 1000 cuts' trick. Dante the magician is an interesting character, the plot is well-written and there are some imaginate sets.As I said, it's not one of L & H's best, but it's still a classic and certainly more than worth watching.8 out of 10