Swiss Miss 1938

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy star as Stan and Ollie, two indefatigable mousetrap salesmen who venture to Switzerland, convinced that a country famous for cheese will naturally attract a flood of mice and paying customers. The journey promises easy money, but the pair soon discovers that rural life is not exactly the windfall they envisioned, and their optimism meets a stubborn, cheese-fueled reality.

They reach a village where the locals are unmoved, and a dishonest cheese shop owner swindles them with counterfeit money, leaving the duo broke and hungry. With no money to eat, they land at a nearby inn, where they must wash dishes under the sharp gaze of the inn’s chef Adia Kuznetzoff, whose temper and exacting standards sharpen their everyday blunders into comic disasters.

Nearby, Victor Albert — a composer living at the same inn with his assistant Edward Eric Blore — is crafting an opera meant to eclipse the fame of his wife Anna. The atmosphere between ambition and vanity crackles as Victor resists reconciliation, while Anna Albert Grete Natzler, determined to win back her husband’s respect, takes a job as a chambermaid at the inn, quietly closing the distance between them and stirring old passions.

Amid all this, Stan’s drinking complicates a plan to move Victor’s piano up to a remote treehouse, setting off a chaotic sequence that culminates in a tense encounter with a local musician’s pet gorilla Charles Gemora on a perilous rope bridge. The accident destroys the piano, forcing the group to improvise on the hotel’s organ, whose peculiar, bubbly tones emerge from their clumsy tinkering and set a whimsical, almost musical mood across the room.

Ollie falls for Anna, unaware of her true identity, and serenades her with Stan’s tubist accompaniment, while the chef watches with growing alarm, warning that Anna cannot attend the upcoming festival. Undeterred, Stan, Ollie, and Anna slip into disguises as gypsies for the festival, where Anna’s performance catches Victor’s ear and slowly rekindles the old flame, bringing the estranged spouses back toward each other in a moment of tentative harmony.

As the group prepares to leave the village, the gorilla reappears, a lingering symbol of the chaos that has trailed them through their Swiss misadventure and a reminder that trouble never truly stays behind.