Silent Films: pre-team 1921-1927 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1927 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1928 Laurel and Hardy Silents 1929 Laurel and Hardy sound films (alphabetical order): A-Haunting We Will Go Air Raid Wardens Another Fine Mess Any Old Port! Atoll K (aka Utopia) Babes In Toyland Beau Hunks Be Big! Below Zero Berth Marks The Big Noise Block-Heads Blotto The Bohemian Girl Bonnie Scotland Brats The Bullfighters Busy Bodies Chickens Come Home - The Chimp A Chump At Oxford Come Clean County Hospital The Dancing Masters The Devil's Brother aka Fra Diavolo Dirty Work The Fixer Uppers The Flying Deuces Fra Diavolo aka The Devil's Brother Going Bye-Bye! Great Guns Helpmates Hog Wild The Hoose-Gow Jitterbugs Laughing Gravy The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case The Live Ghost Me And My Pal Men O'War The Midnight Patrol The Music Box Night Owls Nothing But Trouble Oliver The Eighth One Good Turn Our Relations Our Wife Pack Up Your Troubles Pardon Us Perfect Day Saps At Sea Scram! Sons of the Desert Swiss Miss Their First Mistake Them Thar Hills They Go Boom! Thicker Than Water Tit For Tat Towed In A Hole Twice Two Unaccustomed As We Are Utopia (aka Atoll K) Way Out West Specials: Cameos Cartoons For Love Or Mummy Laurel and Hardy Memories "Stan"

Laurel and Hardy Silents 1927 The Second Hundred Years (20m) Call of the Cuckoo (19m) Hats Off (missing film, full length unknown) Putting Pants on Philip (19m) The Battle of the Century (partially missing film, full length unknown) Directors: Fred Guiol (1); Clyde Bruckman (2,4,5) and Hal Yates (3) DVD Availability: Try sendit.com/amazon Viewpoint: "- How long are you in for? -" "- Forty years -" "- Mail this for me when you get out -" The run of silents in this section are generally regarded as the first “Laurel and Hardy” pictures. There are disputes to this – Stan himself regarded Putting Pants On Philip/The Battle of the Century the first “official” Laurel and Hardy movies, though either case doesn’t really seem to be overly reliant on logic. Simply put, while the two are now very much the stars of the shorts here, the characters they play still aren’t the traditional Laurel and Hardy characters. They may act like them, at times, and may even look like them (not that hard, given that they were being played by the same actors, right?), but from Little Goofy to Nephew Philip, or J. Piedmont Mumblethunder to Canvasback Clump, these aren’t Stan and Ollie. Regardless of this small issue, it matters little, for these shorts are very, very funny. There are technological elements that make watching The Second Hundred Years difficult today, such as the non-contemporary soundtrack, the anachronism of new title cards and the appalling quality of the film stock. But dig underneath this (allusory pun unintended) and you’ll find a very good film aching to get out. Stan might be playing Chaplin lite at times, but there’s some inspired material in there, and a well-structured plot. It also features several classic moments that would be revisited in their sound shorts in later years. Disrupting the flow of a newly developed chemistry (weird to think that the duo we’ve come to look back on and love were once being invented) was a cameo in a Max Davidson comedy. Hal Roach placed some of his regulars – Stan, Ollie and James Finlayson along with Charley Chase – into Call of the Cuckoo (often erroneously credited in plural), an inventive yet oddly unfunny two-reeler that had the four of them performing forced "wackiness". After this we get a Laurel and Hardy picture that’s been elevated to almost mythic territory… Hats Off. One of just four joint Laurel and Hardy movies that are missing, it joins the Technicolor musical Rogue Song (1930) and the half-complete Now I’ll Tell One (1927) and The Battle of the Century (1927) as the most sought-after film of all. The inspiration for The Music Box, it features James Finlayson getting them to deliver a washing machine and concludes with a full scale hat-ripping contest. While rumoured reports of all the other missing films have abounded from time to time, this one seems to have vanished entirely. A piece of trivia concerns the following two films, Putting Pants on Philip and Battle of the Century, as well as 1928's Their Purple Moment: all three feature the club "The Pink Pup", although only the latter features them actually going inside it. As for Putting Pants on Philip, then it's a charming, sweet film. While now very much the leads, Ollie is playing Stan's Uncle and Stan a Scottish sex pest, the Philip of the title. That a film about a man who compulsively chases women, who accidentally exposes himself and who takes exception to having his inside leg measurement taken could be rendered without being crass shows the perfect innocent delight of Laurel and Hardy. Their most risqué film by some way, it still delights rather than offends, appears amusing rather than vulgar. One of the films that is represented in this site's "clips" section, it's a wonderful piece that has expansive, wide shots of large city streets, teaming with masses of people. It speaks of an era where hope and prosperity were all around, the increasing industrial success of America gleaming out from every frame. Sadly, the onset of the Depression two years later meant that Laurel and Hardy's sound movies under Hal Roach were produced under less joyful times... yet times that pushed their work further into art and social commentary. The Battle of the Century actually has two hidden subtexts that perhaps wouldn’t be immediately obvious to someone who hadn’t read into the duo a little. The first is that the “biggest custard pie fight in film history” was, it’s claimed, actually a satire of slapstick, an OTT send-up of cliché. Unfortunately, while it doesn’t quite qualify as a “missing” film, over half of Battle of the Century no longer exists, with approximately 9'34m in the archives. 3’12m of this is the aforementioned pie fight that came from Robert Youngson’s documentary Laurel and Hardy's Laughing 20's. It’s this source that makes what’s left so tightly edited, with Youngson's highlights documentary overriding much of the original editing by Richard Currier and omitting other scenes, the original source material long since missing. It's still decent stuff, but satire or not, you can keep the pie fighting – what makes this one for me is the boxing match with Stan, which is absolutely hysterical. This is actually where the second subtext comes in, because I wouldn’t have known unless I’d read it that the “long count” here (complete with animated second calls over the picture) is a parody of the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney bout of September 1927, where Dempsey failed to return to a neutral corner after knocking down Tunney in the 7th round, thus giving Tunney a long 14-second count and allowing him to recover and win the bout. As an example of how quickly the studios worked in those days, the Dempsey-Tunney rematch (actually titled "The Battle of the Century") took place on September 22nd... the short was filmed in September/October and released in December of that year.