Our Relations

Premise

Laurel and Hardy star as both their famous Stan and Ollie characters and as Stan and Ollie's twin brothers Bert and Alf.

Cast

Production

In most of the Laurel and Hardy films, their usual Stan and Ollie characters are a pair of hopeless but likable dimwits, often just barely able to earn a living. In Our Relations, Stan and Ollie are respectable citizens with wives and steady employment. It is their seafaring twin brothers, Alf Laurel and Bert Hardy, who are dim-witted incompetents sailors aboard the S.S Periwinkle.

On board, Alf and Bert wear seafaring garb. Once ashore, they dress in "civilian" clothes—down to the traditional derbies—making them nearly indistinguishable from their brothers. Stan always wore a bow-tie, while Oliver wore the more conventional type. This is reversed for the brothers, with Alf wearing the usual style and Bert wearing the bowtie. Music cues also help differentiate between the twins; Laurel & Hardy's theme song, "Dance of the Cuckoos", plays when Stan and Ollie appear; the tunes "Sailing, Sailing over the Bounding Main" or "Sailor's Hornpipe", play when Alf and Bert are onscreen.

The film is distinguished by the camera work of successful dramatic cinematographer Rudolph Maté (The Passion of Joan of Arc). The film was based on the story The Money Box by W.W. Jacobs. The story was adapted by Jack Jevne and Charley Rogers and the film written by Felix Adler and Richard Connell.

Legacy

In 2000, the Dutch revivalist orchestra The Beau Hunks collaborated with the Metropole Orchestra to re-create composer Leroy Shield's soundtrack to Our Relations from original sheet music that had been discovered in a Los Angeles archive in 1994 and 1995.