Morecambe and Wise - The Magnificent Two [DVD]

Morecambe & Wise embark on a journey to sell toy soldiers, and get mixed up in a political war. The scene where Eric has to be shot is side-splittingly funny. From the opening scene when they do a mock battle with the toys,to the end credits I did not stop laughing, Eric and Ernie at the top of the tree.
This is in my opinion the best film they made, it has a good story line and the plot is easy to follow, my 10 year old son was in hysterics when watching it. A must have for any video collection. If you cant buy it, beg, borrow, or steal it. Must be seen!!!!

"We were doing quite all right until you opened your big mouth. `Long live the President.'"
"How was I to know they'd just shot him?"

Intended by the Rank Organisation as a replacement for Norman Wisdom when he made noises about leaving the studio, Morecambe and Wise's big screen career never really took off - hardly surprising considering the poor quality of their first two films. Part of the problem was that, despite their TV work showing the influence of screen double acts like Laurel and Hardy, the scripts never played to their strengths: no extended routines, no amateur dramatics, no comic musical numbers, just characters that could probably be played by most capable comic actors throwing in the odd bit of backchat. Fine as long as the backchat was funny, but too often the scripts were flat and the situations old stock well past their sell by date.

Their final shot at the movies, 1967's The Magnificent Two, is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination but it's certainly a considerable improvement even if it is more mildly amusing than funny. This time they're a pair of down on their luck travelling salesmen trying to sell Action Man figures in the middle of a South America revolution until - as anyone who's ever seen a comedy involving South American politics can guess - Eric's resemblance to the dead figurehead of the revolutionaries sees him catapulted to the presidency where he naturally becomes a target for the people who put him in power.

You can't exactly accuse Rank of stinting on the production values here: South America may have exactly the same vegetation as Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire in the same way that every British country road in a 40s Hollywood film looked just like Coldwater Canyon and the capital city will be familiar to anyone who's seen The Singer Not the Song, but there are surprisingly elaborate and destructive action scenes, as well as a surprisingly high body count for a comedy. The latter starts to make sense when you remember that producer Hugh Stewart was himself a combat photographer who was the uncredited director of the Oscar-winning wartime documentary Desert Victory and was an advisor on Schindler's List because of the footage he shot of the liberation of Belsen. Not that the film is exactly a weighty treatise on the horrors of war: it all ends with the kind of sexist joke involving female soldiers that you'd never get away with today. Bananas it's not, but it has its nostalgic charms as inoffensive rainy day stuff, as pleasant and instantly forgettable as Ron Goodwin's jaunty score.

ITV Studios' DVD is letterboxed, but the print is faded and has had way too much Dolby Noise Reduction applied to it - the cast don't quite leave vapor trails in their wake as they mve across the screen, but there's certainly some unwelcome blurring in places. Ironically the picture quality on the theatrical trailer included has none of those problems.

My personal favorite of the three Morecambe & Wise forays onto the big screen. The one I'm happy to watch on many occasions. It came across as a deliberately less serious plot line than the The Intelligence Men or That Riviers Touch so it can be viewed more enjoyably. It does help that Isobel Black ( Juanita ) has a fairly major part; she has always been top of my tree. Let's face it men, who wouldn't have wanted to swap places with Eric & Ernie - ? !