The Bohemian Girl *** (1936, Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Mae Busch, Thelma Todd, Antonio Moreno) – Classic Movie Review 7368

Directors James W Horne and Charles [Charley] R Rogers’s 1936 Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy comedy The Bohemian Girl is another of their operetta send-ups, following The Devil’s Brother [Fra Diavolo] (1933).

Laurel and Hardy star as Stan and Ollie, who join an encamped gypsy band and adopt an abandoned girl, Arline (Darla Hood as a child, Jacqueline Wells – aka Julie Bishop – as a grownup), unaware that she is the daughter of Count Arnheim (William P Carleton). Ollie’s Wife (Mae Busch) has kidnapped Arline but then just run off with her lover, Devilshoof (Antonio Moreno).

The Bohemian Girl entertains very amiably and there are some excellent sequences in this reworking of Michael William Balfe’s operetta, including the hilarious one where Stan tries to fill wine bottles and becomes more and more inebriated. Oddly, there is no credited writer of the screenplay based on Alfred Bunn’s 1843 original libretto.

Songs from the operetta by Michael William Balfe include: ‘I Dreamt That I Dwelt in Marble Halls’, ‘Then You’ll Remember Me’, ‘The Heart Bowed Down’. ‘But Memory Is the Only Friend That Grief Can Call Its Own’, plus the new number ‘Heart of a Gypsy’ (by Nathaniel Shilkret and Robert Shayon).

Also in the cast are Zeffie Tilbury as the Gypsy Queen, James Finlayson as Captain Finn, Thelma Todd as the Gypsy Queen’s Daughter, Mitchell Lewis, Felix Knight, Eddie Borden, Harry Bowen, Andrea Leeds, Sam Lufkin, Margaret Mann, James C Morton, Bob O’Connor, Lane Chandler, Paulette Goddard, Bobby Dunn, Lee Phelps, Harold Switzer, Leo Willis and Harry Bernard.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7368

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