Two Tars

Laurel and Hardy play two sailors on shore leave who decide to rent an automobile. With Laurel at the wheel, he nearly crashes the car into a pedestrian at a street corner. Hardy apologizes for Stan's poor driving, takes the wheel, and shortly thereafter crashes the car into a lamppost. Chagrined, Hardy drives off and parks in front of a drugstore where two young ladies are having difficulty with a street-side vending machine that has taken their penny without giving them a gumball. Hardy tries to shake a gumball from the dispenser but only ends up breaking the glass container, scattering gumballs all over the sidewalk.

Seeing this, the angry proprietor confronts Hardy with Stan joining in, constantly slipping on the scattered gumballs. The girls come to their rescue and rough up the proprietor, accidentally breaking another gumball machine in the process. The quartet make their escape to the open road;but not for long.

As film scholar William Everson wrote--"Road repairs have caused a massive traffic tie-up.Tempers have already reached the breaking point,and Hardy's arrival is not welcomed"

Accidental bumping of Edgar Kennedy's car soon escalates into all-out war between dozens of motorists.When they aren't pulling parts off each other's cars,grease guns and overripe tomatoes make effective secondary weapons.

When a policeman finally arrives,a steamroller flattens his motorcycle.Stan&Ollie use this distraction to make their escape---into a train tunnel. Their own car soon joins the undriveable wrecks they have left behind them.

One of the most elaborate silent comedy shorts, Two Tars was filmed as a three reel (30-minute) comedy originally called Two Tough Tars and edited down to 20 minutes. The opening scenes were shot on Main Street in Culver City, and the car battle scenes were filmed in Santa Monica along what is now Centinela Avenue.

Chapters — called Tents — of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, all take their names from L&H films. There are four Two Tars Tents in Solingen, Germany; Guernsey, Channel Islands; North Illinois/Wisconsin Border; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A fifth Two Tars Tent was established in Reidsville, North Carolina, but is no longer active.

• Two Tars at IMDb
• Two Tars at AllMovie
• Two Tars at the TCM Movie Database
• Two Tars at Rotten Tomatoes