Laurel & Hardy in 1932′s “Their First Mistake”.(1 of 3) Ollie is married a

Laurel & Hardy in 1932′s “Their First Mistake”.(1 of 3) Ollie is married and Stan lives across the hall. Ollie’s wife is jealous of all the time Ollie spends with Stan. She even says Ollie should be ashamed when walking down the street with Stan. They are chased into Stan’s apartment by the wife declaring she would leave him is he spends any more time with Stan. Hardy says, “She says that I think more of you than I do of her.” Laurel: “Well you do, don’t you/” Hardy: We won’t go into that.”
When discussing how to keep wifey occupied so they can continue seeing one another, they sit on the bed and proceed to constantly change positions in a sort of a symbollic ballet.
Interestingly for me is that Their First Mistake is the first film L&H made after their first trip to England when they had a massive crowd of fans here in The US for the send off and 1000s to greet and cheer for them in England. There was never anything like it at the time. Thus realizing how much they were loved I would think that Stan would’ve felt it was time to push the sexuality vagueness issue a little bit to the gay side. The end result probably wasn’t quite as strong as he wanted. I like to think Hardy’s response to the question if he liked Stan more than his wife, his answer would have been of course he did instead of We’ll talk about that later. I think the movements on the bed represented gay sexual positions and the cozy bed scene was as symbolically suggestive as they dared. Another scene was Ollie fighting the nipple that was sucked in on the bottle, think a quick kiss on the lips would’ve been a nice touch.