Wow! Such a good movie.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Anyone else and I probably wouldn't be as receptive, but Laurel and Hardy make destroying someone's home a unique exercise in physical comedy. Frequent collaborator James Finlayson is on hand as well, not so much as a foil this time, but as a participant in the extremes the opposing parties go to in order to one-up the other. What really amazed this viewer was when Ollie took an axe and actually chopped a tree down in the picture - holy cow! With both sides going on a tear, the one thing that would have made this better and perhaps more ironic, would have been to have Finlayson's character a guest at the home the Boys wrecked. Talk about 'good will toward men', it never had a chance.

First let me say that I bow to no one on earth in my love for Laurel and Hardy. They were the greatest comics in cinema history, in my view. Yes, better than Chaplin, yes even better than Keaton (though I consider Keaton more of a film artist than a comic — in that realm, he's untouchable).So I feel fully qualified, knowing The Boys' oeuvre backwards and forwards, to state that this film, while good, is overrated.I used to believe that its status as the absolute apotheosis of their film career (and perhaps in all of film comedy) was simply a matter of a statement being repeated again and again until it becomes the truth without regard to its actual substance.This still may be so, though I would think at least some of the reviewers here may not have read every book on Laurel and Hardy that exists, as I have...so maybe this really is their unaided view.In any case — this is a one-joke film. There are some amusing bits, but there is very little of the character exploration and development that goes hand in hand with the slapstick and marks the best Laurel and Hardy comedies. Once the game is on with Fin, it's simply a series of ever-escalating spasms of childish destruction. They did this sort of tit-for-tat mutual destruction bit much more deftly in other films — and most of those films have additional L&H delights going for them that this one-trick pony does not.To me, the ultimate test is the laugh quotient. There are a great many Laurel and Hardy films that can literally put me on the floor, collapsed in helpless laughter. This is not one of them. I know that I may be virtually alone in my view of "Big Business," but that's OK. To those who are new to Laurel and Hardy, I just want to say that there are many other films in their canon that are superior to this one.

The premise of this movie is very good. Laurel & Hardy are trying to sell Christmas trees in sunny California. Of course nobody wants to buy any. One of their costumers is being played by James Finlayson, with who they get into a serious brawl.Basically the movie only has one big joke; The two boys totally wrecking Finlayson's house, while he totally wrecks the boys their car and Christmas trees. It's sort of fun to watch, mainly thanks to the acting and of the chemistry the three of them have on the screen. But it's not really a movie that made me laugh constantly. Sure of course I laughed and the movie had its moments of greatness but it overall wasn't really surprising enough to make this for me a memorable Laurel & Hardy comedy short.Call me old fashioned but I prefer a Laurel & Hardy short with more slapstick humor in it, rather than just constantly wrecking and throwing things.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

BIG BUSINESS Aspect ratio: 1.33:1Sound format: Silent(Black and white - Short film)A minor dispute between two Christmas tree salesmen (Laurel and Hardy) and an irate customer (James Finlayson) escalates into massive mutual destruction.The first collaboration between L&H and veteran comedy director James Horne is a masterpiece of its kind, in which two bickering salesmen become involved in a war of attrition with bad-tempered customer Finlayson (an invaluable member of the L&H universe). The escalation of conflict is joyously contrived (Finlayson reduces The Boys' car to spare parts, and they do the same to his house), and the pay-off - in which the entire cast is reduced to tears! - is no less satisfactory. Legend has it that the filmmakers accidentally destroyed the wrong house, after hiring the one next door...