Few film scholars elevated the 1929 short “Wrong Again” to classic status, but I’m willing to go out on a limb to suggest it deserves such an honorific classification. It was among the last wave of Laurel and Hardy’s silent output and had three future Oscar winners behind the camera – director Leo McCarey, cinematographer George Stevens, and screenwriter Lewis R. Foster – plus one of the most wonderfully original sight gags of all time.
The concept of “Wrong Again” is simple – Laurel and Hardy are stable hands at a riding academy who learn that a local millionaire is offering a reward for the return of the stolen “Blue Boy.” The item in question is the famous Gainsborough painting, but the pair mistakenly think the purloined piece is a horse at the academy named Blue Boy. They arrive with the horse at the millionaire’s mansion, but the wealthy resident is finishing his bath and he tosses the key to the front door to Hardy with instructions to bring Blue Boy inside the house. The duo is initially confused that someone would want a horse in their house, but they conclude millionaires are an eccentric bunch who live by different concept than average folks.
Things become complicated when the millionaire calls down to Laurel and Hardy to put Blue Boy on his piano. Getting the horse on the piano is a challenge, but things become more difficult when one of the piano legs breaks and Hardy bears the physical brunt of lifting it (along with the horse on top) which Stan restores the piano leg to its rightful place – even if Hardy’s head somehow gets lodged between the instrument and its support.
The real star of “Wrong Again” is the horse, which is wonderfully trained to ascend, remain in position, and jump down from the piano. The sequence with the broken piano leg and Hardy trying to hold up the horse-topped instrument is a neat bit of special effects – even after multiple viewings, it is not easily ascertained how that feat was accomplished.
“Wrong Again” also has a wonderful running gag involving the statue of a nude female that Hardy accidentally breaks into three parts. In reassembling it, the modest Hardy removes his jacket to cover the middle section of the statue – only to put it in place backwards, with its posterior facing frontward. The usually dimwitted Laurel realizes something is wrong with this anatomy in his pensive review of statue’s unlikely anatomy.
“Wrong Again” came at the tail end of the silent film era and was mostly forgotten until it was rediscovered in Robert Youngson’s 1960s compilation films of the Laurel and Hardy shorts. Perhaps the oddest comment ever connected to the film was historian’s William J. Everson’s musing on whether “Wrong Again” was inspired by the Luis Buñuel / Salvador Dalí surrealist work “Un Chien Andalou” with its dead donkeys on pianos. In a word: huh?