Synopsis
The Music Box (1932) is the Laurel and Hardy short comedy you can watch online on iFILM. The whole plot fits in a sentence: two movers have to haul a heavy player piano up a towering outdoor staircase to Professor von Schwarzenhoffen's house. Everything else is twenty-nine minutes of escalating disaster.
The piano slips and slides back down the moment the top comes into view. Then it happens again. A sharp-tongued nursemaid, a furious passerby and the short-fused professor himself, played by Billy Gilbert, keep making things worse. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy turn a simple delivery into a Sisyphean ordeal — except the boulder is a piano and the punishment is laughter.
Director James Parrott made the first short film ever to win an Academy Award, taking the inaugural prize for live-action short subject. The staircase routine has been quoted and stolen by physical comedians ever since. If you want to see where a whole century of slapstick was born, this is the place to start. Stream The Music Box (1932) online on iFILM.
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