Big Business

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy at their most gloriously, methodically destructive. The premise is simplicity itself: Stan and Ollie are door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen working a Los Angeles neighborhood in July. When one homeowner (the magnificent James Finlayson) refuses to buy, a petty argument escalates into an epic, meticulously choreographed war of reciprocal demolition — each side taking turns destroying one item at a time while the other watches politely. The genius of Laurel and Hardy's "tit-for-tat" comedy has never been better demonstrated: every act of destruction follows a perfectly logical escalation, and the pair's commitment to the bit is absolute. At twenty minutes, it's one of the most perfectly structured comedies ever made, and proof that sometimes the simplest ideas produce the biggest laughs.