Trying to ID a Laurel & Hardy movie.
All I remember is a scene where they had been locked in the basement of the Empire State Building. They thought they were on a submarine and were turning all the valves to try a sink it.
Any help?
Well, I’m old, but I was sure it was Laurel & Hardy, but maybe not. I’ll have to look on you tube. Thanks for the hint.
This is the movie/play of which True Lies was a loose remake. In the first movie, Tony Curtis’s wife was played by Janet Leigh; in the second, Ahrnold’s wife was Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Tony and Janet IRL.
I caught Who Was That Lady? on TV one night after I had seen True Lies. I thought it looked familiar, but I couldn’t quite place it until it came to the “torture” scene, which was a dead giveaway. (Larry Storch made a great villain!)
It’s odd that I don’t recall it being in B&W; maybe I was watching a colorized version.
I was a big fan of L&H in my teens and 20s (I’m 67 now), and I believe I saw most of their shorts and features at least once, and I’m quite sure that I never saw a scene like that.
Given my failing memory, and the possibility that I may have somehow missed one or two titles, I won’t say definitively that it’s not L&H, but it just doesn’t feel like them. I will be truly shocked if that scene was in a L&H film.
I guess it’s a false memory then. But I think I remember Stan doing his kind of whining and panicking as they turn all the valves they can find.
I looked on you tube and “who was that lady” seems not to be there.
Well, just to prove the fallibilty of my memory, when I searched on “Laurel and Hardy” and “submarine,” I turned up this film, The Big Noise, which I certainly never saw, and the title of which I have zero recollection. If you had asked me ten minutes ago if the boys ever made a film with that title, I would have answered no with a pretty high degree of confidence. (To be fair to myself, it is one of their last and least movies.)
Unfortunately for you, however, if you read the Wikipedia summary, you’ll see that it does not seem to include the scene you remember.
As a former vice president once said, what a waste it is to lose one’s mind, or not to have a mind.
Yeah, I looked at that one, but it’s not it.
Are these images close?
Yes! I think you’ve got it!
Must go reprogram memory bank. I hope I don’t need to reformat… 
I never really noticed it before, but: Tony Curtis, when young and slim and doing a taken-aback look that’s not quite wide-eyed, really does have more than a bit of Stan Laurel about him…
So did Dick van Dyke. I think it was common back then.
Van Dyke « borrowed » a lot from Stan Laurel, as he acknowledges here:
I remember when Stan passed away in 1965. Dick hosted an hour-long tribute to him on CBS:
I grew up watching Laurel and Hardy late Saturday nights on WCCO in Minneapolis. They were the last thing on before the station signed off around 2:00 or 3:00 am.
I was already familiar with their shorts by the time I was five.
I agree! I think I’ve seen all of the L&H movies and shorts. My son was on a L&H kick from the age of 2 until the end of his life. We watched every one of them multiple times. The OPs description is not a bit familiar.