Production and Exhibition
December 1928 was a frenetic month for the Laurel and Hardy unit at Roach: they had a commitment for several films, and the studio was slated to close at the end of the month for the installation of the new sound equipment. The filming of the "minor masterpiece" Wrong Again had just wrapped on the first, and the unit would go on to wrap its landmark Big Business just after Christmas.
Leo McCarey got the "Story by" credit, although L&H Encyclopedia author Glenn Mitchell also traces some lineage back to the 1926 Roach short Along Came Auntie, with Glenn Tryon and Oliver Hardy and a writing co-credit for Stan Laurel. L&H scholar Randy Skretvedt has run down many of the "action scripts" for L&H two reelers, and the one for That's My Wife reveals a few differences between original concept and finished film. One is a sub-plot that finds the actual Magnolia Hardy at a nearby table at the Pink Pup, and she becomes the target of flirtations from Uncle Bernal. There was also an unfilmed (or unused) gag where a helium balloon tangles in Stan's wig and keeps threatening to lift it off his head.
Most significant, though, is the script-to-screen evolution of the ending. On paper, Stan was to have been searched — bodily — by a female officer in the hunt for the purloined pendant; he was to refuse the manhandling, though, and leave the club after revealing the masquerade to Uncle Bernal. Ollie was then to have informed Uncle that his real wife was the woman whom Bernal had been flirting with, and, embarrassed, Uncle would promise to pony up the inheritance — which in turn would power newfound interest by Magnolia toward her rotund hubby. "The problem with this ending," writes Skretvedt, "is that it's just too happy. Ollie still has his fortune and his wife, but he's lost Stan's friendship. In the film, he loses everything but Stan's friendship — which is more like it."
Read more about this topic: That's My Wife (1929 Film)
Famous quotes containing the words production and/or exhibition:
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“The hardiest skeptic who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or has visited a menagerie or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas, will not deny the validity of education. “A boy,” says Plato, “is the most vicious of all beasts;” and in the same spirit the old English poet Gascoigne says, “A boy is better unborn than untaught.””
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)