User Reviews

I was not surprised to discover that 'Mixed Nuts' was recut from footage in two other shorts: this film's storyline is incoherent. Also (in the print I viewed, at least) the photography in some scenes is so dark that I could barely follow the action.

Stan Laurel, pre-Hardy, plays a lunatic who thinks he's Napoleon. By the way, is there even one documented case in authentic medical literature of a mental case who thought he was Napoleon? The funniest gags here are in the intertitles, when someone comments of Laurel: 'He thinks Waterloo is a swimming pool.' (That gag would never have played in Laurel's native Britain, where there are plenty of jokes conflating Waterloo the battlefield and Waterloo the railway station.) Also in this film, we have coal dust identified as 'Pittsburgh talcum'. I was surprised when a wisecrack in the intertitles referred to Laurel -- his face blackened by coal -- as 'Al Jolson' ... because at this point (1922) Jolson was still exclusively a stage performer, and I didn't expect 1922 movie audiences to get that gag. However, I viewed a print with most of the original intertitles replaced by later ones: the Jolson jape may have been inserted at some point after 'The Jazz Singer'.

Eventually, Laurel commandeers a steamroller and uses it as a tank ... a surprising gambit for a man who allegedly thinks he's Napoleon Bonaparte. I can't recall Napoleon ever using tank warfare.

At one point in this movie, some boys play a game cried 'shinny-on-your-side'. I've asked several American friends if they've ever encountered this term. So far, nothing.

'Mixed Nuts' contains some plot business that (with my British cultural references) I didn't understand, but which an American friend explained to me. I had often heard the phrase 'meal ticket' as a slang term, but was unaware of its literal meaning. In 'Mixed Nuts', there's some business with an actual meal ticket: in some old-time diners, the charges were totted up progressively, with the customer paying at the end. Modern American audiences probably won't understand this any more than I did.

'Mixed Nuts' is mostly interesting as a glimpse of Stan Laurel still fighting to find a screen character in his own right, getting away from his stint as Chaplin's understudy (in the Fred Karno troupe) and as Chaplin's outright imitator (in 'The Keystone Trio' of American vaudeville). Max Asher, quite funny in some Hal Roach films, is given nothing to do here. As an alleged comedy, this movie falls flat. I'll rate it just one point out of 10.