The premise is simple, little more than an outline: Stan and Ollie, in the role of stable boys, mistake the title of one of Thomas Gainsborough most celebrated paintings, The Blue Boy, for the name of a horse they are supposed to be looking after. A banal coincidence, the reporting of a theft, a millionaire’s reward: it is enough to produce a comic jewel. We know now that the first screening of Un chien andalou took place just four months after the release of Wrong Again and yet, when we see the iconic image of the horse on the piano, we cannot help but think of Dalí and Bunuel and their donkeys on the piano; it seems to both prefigure and parody the avant garde. If, as Ollie puts it, the rich think differently and do everything “backwards” (it is no coincidence that the film was originally going to be called Just the Reverse), then life is little more than a succession of uncontrollable and inexplicable events, and nothing remains in its place. It is in this normalisation of the absurd that the synergy between Stan and Ollie reaches its highest level of expressivity: an elaborate choreography of coordinated chaos.

Alessandro Criscitiello