Saps at Sea is a 1940 film directed by Gordon Douglas, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
The film opens with Stan and Ollie working in a horn-testing business. Ollie has a nervous breakdown due to the incessant honking, with horns becoming a Berserk Button that send him into violent furies. A doctor diagnoses him with "hornophobia" and recommends he get sea air and, um, goat's milk.
Stan and Ollie don't have the cash for an ocean voyage, but luckily they live in a coastal town and so they can rent a boat tied up to the dock. They find a dilapidated old bucket and, goat in tow, settle in for the night. Unfortunately two bad things happen. First, an escaped murderer named Nick Grainger, on the run for the cops, hides out on the boat. Second, the goat, tied to the dock, chews through the mooring line and sets the boat adrift. Stan and Ollie awake to find themselves out on the open ocean, trapped with a murderer.
This is the last film Laurel and Hardy made with producer Hal Roach. Consequently it's also the last film they made with Roach stock players, including James Finlayson (the doctor), who had been playing Laurel and Hardy antagonists since the silent days.
Tropes:
- Berserk Button: Just the sound of a honking horn, or a musical horn like a trombone, will send the normally meek Ollie into a violent fury.
- Binocular Shot: Near the end, as the Harbor Patrol man looks through his binoculars and sees Stan and Ollie's boat adrift.
- Comically Cross-Eyed: The reason the plumbing in the apartment building is so wacky is that it was hooked up by a comically cross-eyed plumber, played in a brief appearance by the Trope Maker, Ben Turpin. This was the last film role for Turpin, who died a couple of months after the film's release.
- Downer Ending: Stan and Ollie are set up to claim the $5000 reward for catching Nick Grainger, but Stan the dummy just has to play his horn again. This pushes Ollie's Berserk Button and provokes him into attacking the Harbor Patrol cop, and as the film ends the boys are being tossed into jail, in the same cell as Nick!
- Dramatic Irony: The boys wake up and Ollie says "You were right Stanley, you can get just as much sea air here tied to a dock as you can in the middle of the ocean." They are in the middle of the ocean, the boat having gone adrift in the night.
- Extra! Extra! Read All About It!: Newspaper vendors hawk papers with a giant "KILLER ESCAPES" headline about the escape of Nick Grainger.
- Extreme Omni-Goat: The goat chews through the mooring line, sending Stan and Ollie and Nick the killer adrift at sea.
- Flipping the Table: Ollie does this at the horn testing business, flipping over a table covered with horns as he has his breakdown.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: Nick intimidates the boys by firing from the hip with his pistol and shooting a seagull out of the sky.
- Lethal Chef: Nick orders the boys to cook him a meal, but there's no food. So Stan and Olllie make a fake meal, substituting brewed chewing tobacco for coffee, string for spaghetti, red paint for sauce, sponges for meatballs, grated soap for cheese...Unfortunately Nick finds out and tells them to eat it first.
- Musical Trigger: The sound of horns sends Ollie into violent rages. However once the horns go away Ollie reverts back to his usual Lovable Coward self. At the climax when Stan's horn playing is provoking Ollie into beating up Nick, Ollie shouts for Stan to keep playing the horn until Nick is subdued.
- Percussive Maintenance: Played with. Stan's attempt to disable the blaring horn on their car, with a hammer, results in him knocking the entire engine block out of the car—yet, somehow, the car still runs.
- "Wanted!" Poster: Technically it's not a wanted poster, but rather a wanted mugshot printed on the front page of the paper. It serves the same effect, telling Stan and Ollie who their unwanted guest is.
