Still image from the 1929 film Big Business.

Big Business

Directed by Leo Mccarey

In this comedic short film, a quarrel between two salesmen and a potential customer leads to an orgy of destruction.

1929 0h 18m Silent TV-G

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CAST
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Leo Mccarey, Director
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Leo Mccarey
Director

1

James Finlayson,
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James Finlayson

2

Retta Palmer,
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Retta Palmer

3

Lyle Tayo,
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Lyle Tayo

4

Charlie Hall,
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Charlie Hall

5

Stan Laurel,
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Stan Laurel

FULL SYNOPSIS

In this comedic short film, a quarrel between two salesmen and a potential customer leads to an orgy of destruction.


ARTICLES
The two-reel silent short Big Business (1929) has long been acknowledged as not only one of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's best films, but quintessential slapstick, and one of the greatest examples of the silent two-reeler. It unspools like a blueprint for pacing a comedy short and becomes an almost existential study in tit-for-tat destruction. As with many other silent shorts from Hal Roach Studios, Big Business was only loosely worked out in advance, mostly by gagman and "supervising director" Leo McCarey. (The director of credit was J. Wesley Horne). Shot entirely outdoors, the original idea was to have the boys, playing door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen in sunny California, encounter several different potential "customers." At the first house, Stan and Ollie greet an unmarried woman who becomes a non-customer when Stan asks, "If you had a husband, would he buy one?" The cast and crew discovered that there was more than enough potential for comedy to fill a two-reeler at the second stop on the sales jaunt, when they landed on the doorstep of James Finlayson's house. Finlayson played the quick-to-burn foil for Laurel and Hardy throughout much of their time with Roach, and never more spectacularly than in this film. The offenses start small: Stan's coat, and then a Christmas tree branch, is caught in the closing door, causing the boys to ring the doorbell repeatedly. Finlayson is fed up, but he does not lose his cool until Stan asks, "Could I take your order fo...

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