Be Big
While this isn’t one of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s best shorts, its premise is very similar to one of their finest features, Sons of the Desert. In both films, the hapless duo is trying to sneak around their wives’ backs to join a group of club mates. In Sons of the Desert, they’re going to a convention; in Be Big, it’s an evening in their honor. The boys have just agreed to go to Atlantic City with their spouses (Isabelle Keith and Anita Garvin), but one of the club men calls Ollie with such enticing details of the celebration that he just has to attend…with Stan in tow, of course. With the help of some talcum powder, Ollie looks pale enough to convince the wives to leave on the trip without him and Stan. Then they hurriedly get into their club outfits, but trouble ensues when Ollie puts on Stanley’s much smaller boots and can’t get them off. The pair’s various attempts to get the boots off Ollie all but destroy Ollie’s apartment — and Ollie. The wives miss the train and return home to discover that they’ve been tricked. Their panicked husbands try to hide in the folding bed, but the wives pull out their shotguns (a common prop for Laurel and Hardy wives) and start blasting away. Originally filmed in black & white, a colorized version was released in the late 1990s., “Be Big.” (1930) Stan and Ollie try to plot a trip without their wives.
