Apart from the fact that alum jokes don’t really play anymore, Tit for Tat is a pretty well perfect film. It quite resembles L&H’s silent milestone, Big Business, in its singleminded devotion to destruction. It actually reminds me, LDS folk, of the no-quarter conclusion of the Book of Ether. (Same with Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.) But let’s give an eloquent and appreciative last word on what’s happening here, and on what so distinguishes so many of these films, to the great Walter Kerr (again, 1975).
“The rules held: Do not react, except to show a degree of resignation; hold for the next slosh, the next rip, the next blow, and then count ten before deciding on the form of reply. The victim, whoever he might be, would remain available.”
There’s a fascinating resignation, even fatality to the mayhem that happens in these films. But it’s not just that, maybe not even that. It might just as well have been courage, constancy, noblesse oblige. Kerr:
“Thus the comedy of Laurel and Hardy came to consist of the pauses between the effronteries. The comedy of the effronteries themselves, the acts of violence we had had before, endlessly. What is distinctively funny about these two men is the time-lag, the unemotional patience, even dignity, with which the unthinkable is accepted, allowed to play itself out. They were still insisting that we fully anticipate the next joke, as they themselves were so plainly anticipating it, and it took a great deal of stolidity, some trace of hauteur, to do that. They chose to be emotionally uninvolved while in all the other respects being horrendously involved: it was a matter of temperament, of comic philosophy, of personal honor. The choice is also, of course, their form of fantasy. Normal men, real men, have much shorter tempers. Theirs is a violence govened by Euclid, maybe Mozart.”
Ah …