We Faw Down is like a sitcom gone sour. Stan and Ollie's wives start out hostile and suspicious, and they go downhill from there. Stan and Ollie are innocently caught in nasty circumstances, yet far from being terrified, they seem strangely nonchalant about the whole thing, as if they want to get caught.
There might be some potential for (very misogynist) comedy here, but the hostility of the situation kills every possibility. As Ollie's suspicious wife, Vivien Oakland (later to make a kinder impression in L&H's Scram! and Way Out West) has a sneer that could seemingly melt the celluloid that preserves it. When Stan and Ollie find themselves (innocently enough) in the apartment of some women other than their wives, they're unusually unconcerned about being two married men sitting around some women's apartment in bathrobes. Then there's the climax, where Ollie tries to bluff his way through his wayward afternoon, his wife's smothering gaze defeating him at every turn. And when Ollie admits defeat in his lie, Stan uncharacteristically laughs his head off at Ollie's plight. He seems to be rehearsing for a similarly out-of-character laugh jag in the later Great Guns.
The movie is most celebrated for its closing gag, where Ollie's wife blasts at him with a shotgun and numerous men, hearing the shots, jump out of windows in varying states of undress. Generations of L&H fans and biographers have never noted how one of L&H's most celebrated gags has little to actually do with L&H, and a lot to do with a poisonously cynical view of marriage.
(C) 2002, Steven Bailey.
