Unfriendly Enemies (1925) Online

Stan Laurel directed ten or eleven shorts. This is number four. Stan also wrote the script in collaboration with James Parrott, and if you don't blink you can grab a glimpse of Stan himself as one of the soldiers in the trench. F. Richard Jones was the supervising director but what he supervised is open to question. The film is short, even by the standards of a one-reel-comedy. It runs somewhat less than ten minutes, and was presumably shot in less than a week. Production values are extremely skimpy, to say the least. Presumably Richard Jones dealt with important issues like whether the lunch wagon arrived on time. Oddly, the movie's greatest appeal to current movie fans will be the brief appearance of cult favorite Fay Wray in the opening scene. Alas, she doesn't return, allowing the boys to do a boring series of ho-hum pratfalls without any further feminine interference. This movie "masterpiece" is available in a just watchable condition in Alpha's "Silent Comedy Marathon", Volume Four.

The unfulfilled Stan Laurel only needed to write his own scripts for another three years before he would make his breakthrough with Oliver Hardy in 'From Soup to Nuts'. Until then, his tortured mind wrote screenplays like this one which were not enjoyable to watch.