Big Business (1929)

USA

Short Film | Comedy | Silent | 19m

Dir: James W. Horne | Scr: H.M. Walker | DP: George Stevens | Prod: Hal Roach | Ed: Richard Currier

Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson, Tiny Sandford

Single-sentence review | 73 words | 29/06/11 | 1929 Favourites

When a pair of door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen prove themselves unable to leave the home of an uninterested customer without getting something stuck in the door – a coat, a tree – a squabble erupts, quickly escalating into an orgy of reciprocal, tit-for-tat violence and destruction, which soon sees his house and their car torn to pieces, in this hilarious Laurel and Hardy short film, their finest silent production, a work rich in allegorical potential.

1000 Nights in the Dark: a collection of reviews of the single sentence, capsule, short, medium, and long variety, varying in length from fifty to a thousand-plus words, documenting my personal, exploratory journey through cinephilia.