Thursday Movie Picks #314: Male Buddy Movies

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is "Male Buddy Movies". I thought of two old movies pretty quickly, and am surprised that it took me a while to come up with the third:

Two Arabian Knights (1927). Louis Wolheim and William Boyd play the buddies, men who serve in the AEF in World War I, get captured by the Germans, break out of a POW camp, and meet an Arabian princess (Mary Astor) on a ship while they escape, which is how they end up in Arabia. The movie won an Oscar for Best Director of a Comedy at the first Oscars (the two directing categories were merged for the next year and thereafter), and was considered lost for decades but found in Howard Hughes' archives and ultimately restored.

So This is College (1929). Robert Montgomery and Elliott Nugent play the buddies, a pair of stars on the college football team who plan to focus on football for their senior year to the exclusion of all else. Of course, a girl (Sally Starr) comes into the picture and threatens to drive a wedge between our two best friends. There's an interesting bunch of people who didn't get a screen credit. Future director Delmer Daves (3:10 to Yuma et al.) is one of the football players; another director, Sam Wood (Kings Row et al.), is the PA announcer at the big game; Joel McCrea, Ann Dvorak, and Ward Bond all supposedly have bit parts.

Sons of the Desert (1933). Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy lie to their wives and say they're going on a cruise for Ollie's health, which is a lie they cook up so that they can go to their fraternal society's national convention. They return home to find that the ship they were supposedly taking for the cruise sank, while a newsreel filmed Stan and Ollie quite prominently in a story about the convention. Good luck getting out of this lie.