JAMES FINLAYSON IN LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES FULL
On top of that, Ladrones runs a full fifteen minutes longer than Night Owls.
What's fun about the alternate version, first, is that Kennedy and Finlayson repeat their roles, though both seem to be highly unlikely speakers of Spanish. Night Owls is a good short and I happen to like it, but I enjoy Ladrones even more. Highlights: they climb over a wall with typical finesse, Stan rips Ollie's clothes, they imitate yowling cats, they get in the house and then lock themselves out, and, best of all, they match wits (as it were) with the Police Chief's butler Meadows, played by Jimmy Finlayson. The guys are permitted lots of leeway for a whole slew of break-in gags, playing off each other in extended sequences without any time-wasting subplots. What could possibly go wrong? Night Owls is seldom cited among the boys' best comedies, but in several respects it's pure Laurel & Hardy. All they have to do is break into the house, stuff a few valuables in a bag, and allow Kennedy to apprehend them. Kennedy promises he will arrest them himself, and see to it that they won't get in any trouble. Kennedy finds the boys sleeping on a park bench, but promises they won't go to jail for vagrancy if they'll agree to burglarize the Chief's home. In the screen version, Stan & Ollie are pawns in a scheme concocted by dim-witted cop Edgar Kennedy, who is in trouble with the Police Chief because he hasn't made any arrests after a rash of burglaries. Ladrones is the Spanish version of Night Owls, which in turn was based on a stage sketch Stan Laurel performed in the years before he teamed with Oliver Hardy. Needless to say, their delivery of pidgin dialog was less than perfect, but their slippery enunciation and weird accents only made their films funnier for those viewers who did speak the lingo. Since Stan and Ollie spoke only English they had to deliver their lines phonetically, with the help of language coaches and an off-screen chalkboard. (The choice of languages varied with each short.) This practice was followed by Roach's other stars as well, even the Our Gang kids.
Neither subtitling nor dubbing had been perfected as yet, and Laurel & Hardy were very popular overseas, so Roach had them remake their films in Spanish, French, and/or German. Today it seems like an incredibly labor-intensive way to make pictures, but in the early '30s it was good business. "Ladrones," which is Spanish for "Thieves," marked the first time producer Hal Roach would have Laurel & Hardy appear in multiple versions of a talkie short, re-shooting the film repeatedly in various European languages for the international trade.
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