The Dancing Masters (1943)

This lesser Laurel and Hardy vehicle casts Stan and Ollie as the proprietors of the "Arthur Hurry" dance studio. Despite a rather sizeable student body (consisting mainly of 20th Century-Fox contract starlets), the boys would starve to death were it not for their only paying customer, socialite Trudy Harlan (Trudy Marshall). Trudy is in love with Grant Lawrence (Robert Bailey), an aspiring inventor who needs financial backing for his revolutionary new flame thrower. Laurel and Hardy undertake several moneymaking schemes to help Grant, most of these coming a-cropper. Finally, Ollie remembers an accident-insurance policy taken out on Stan. He tries to arrange an accident so that the boys can collect a huge fee, but this scheme culminates in a wild bus ride, resulting in Ollie breaking his own leg. The plot of Dancing Masters is a hodgepodge of underdeveloped situations and old gags lifted from such earlier Laurel & Hardy comedies as The Battle of the Century and Thicker Than Water; only occasionally does the comic genius of Stan and Ollie shine through. If the film is memorable at all, it is because of the presence of Robert Mitchum, in an unbilled but sizeable role as an insurance racketeer. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi