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 1928 Leave ’Em Laughing (21m) The Finishing Touch (19m) From Soup to Nuts (18m) You’re Darn Tootin’ (21m) Their Purple Moment (22m) Should Married Men Go Home? (20m) Early To Bed (19m) Two Tars (20m) Habeas Corpus (19m) We Faw Down (20m) Directors: Clyde Bruckman (1, 2); E. Livingston Kennedy (3, 4); James Parrott (5, 6, 8, 9); Emmett J. Flynn (7) and Leo McCarey (10) DVD Availability: Try amazon (region 1) or sendit.com (region 2) Viewpoint: "- If you must make a noise - - Make it quietly -" Who said film stars have an easy life? Back in 1928 Stan and Ollie were sweating over an average of a short per month, though the final four - Liberty, Wrong Again, That’s My Wife and Big Business - weren’t actually released by MGM until 1929, so will be looked at there. Similarly, the first two here were shot in 1927, From Soup to Nuts December ’27/January ’28, but their release dates warrant their inclusion. The ten we have for 1928 are pretty good in their own right, starting with Leave ’Em Laughing, the imagery of which has been made into arguably the team’s most famous, thanks to it appearing on a poster every week in smug sitcom Friends. Joey and Chandler may not have had soul, but they did have great taste in movies. While they had shared a bed before, with Ollie’s bullying butler nearly choking Stan in Slipping Wives (1927), this was the first time the Stan and Ollie characters had slept together. More to the point, this is the first time we really see the Stan and Ollie characters proper, with Stan’s effeminate, emasculated man-child wetting the bed via hot water bottle within the first three minutes. As we have seen and will go on to see, Laurel and Hardy movies were not averse to using homosexuality as a subtext (Putting Pants on Philip (1927)/Liberty (1929) et al.) and it’s appropriate that January 1928 should open with the two sharing a quilt. It’s a superb start, with some great moments of comic violence and Stan’s toothache tugging at your heart. Sadly, it’s also at least a couple of minutes overlong, with the traffic policeman sequence going on past its natural lifespan. In a way, it’s not the fault of the film itself, but of the technology available. Laurel and Hardy remade their silents constantly, and here reworked the basis of the dentistry scene for Pardon Us. (It was also partly inspired by 1925 solo Hardy vehicle Laughing Ladies, 1925). Yet while lesser Laurel and Hardy films like Blotto (1930) and Fra Diavolo (1933) would be enlivened by the duo’s helpless, hysterical laughter, it’s a shame that this is one element of Leaving ’Em Laughing that was never remade. In this case, more than any other, does the short cry out to be a “talkie”, as there was rarely anything funnier than Stan and Ollie in hysterics. The Finishing Touch was a worthwhile, albeit repetitive, hammer ‘n’ nails saga, one which lacked the invention and drive of the classic Busy Bodies (1933), but was still enjoyable in its own right. Unfortunately, the short that followed (From Soup to Nuts) was absolutely dreadful, and arguably the worst in-character Hal Roach short they ever did. Directed by Edgar Kennedy, who had minor roles in thirteen of their movies (and also notched up 21 director credits, including two with the boys) again much of the fault lies not with the original material but with the grating incidental music placed upon it for reissues (very few of the silents exist with their original soundtrack) However, the piece itself relies upon a reprise of the cherry scene from The Second Hundred Years (1927) and the most base, witless form of slapstick. That is, slapstick that develops not from the situation, but because the film requires it. Seeing everything someone touches fall to pieces without motivation is more vexing than amusing, but would have doubtless delighted pre-30s audiences. Kennedy’s direction is also notable in that it attempts innovative shots and angles, but ends up coming over as more amateurish than the usual fare. Kennedy’s second work with the team (You’re Darn Tootin’) is better, though still no great. The idea of Laurel and Hardy in a brass band with their instruments constantly falling to pieces, set to a beat, may appeal to some, but far better is the violent finale where Stan and Ollie punching each other full in the stomach and kicking each other in the shins leads to a full-scale riot with a crowd of strangers ripping off each other’s trousers. Sophisticated? No, but in these two below-par skits it’s the best we get. Even though we’ve discussed which was the first “Laurel and Hardy” movie, it’s still notable that up to and including Their Purple Moment they were still being produced under the “All Star” comedy banner… they were only known as the Laurel and Hardy series in-house and in the trade from Should Married Men Go Home?, which is perhaps appropriate as Their Purple Moment gives us another reminder that Stan and Ollie still aren’t playing Stan and Ollie in name. While the short acts as an inspired battle of the sexes commentary, Stan is here “Mrs. Pincher’s” husband, concealing his cash unsuccessfully in a hidden portrait compartment. It’s a very funny film, actually, and perfectly highlights what I was referring to earlier: slapstick with motivation. In From Soup To Nuts waiters fall over with meals all the time for no real reason other than enforced clumsiness. Here a waiter trips over Stan because he’s trying to hide from paying his bill, drawing even more attention and social embarrassment to him. The basic plot – Stan finds he has no money after taking on a pair of women’s debts, leading to escalating bills, including making a taxi driver wait by buying him a slap-up meal too – is brilliantly devised in its simplicity, and carried off with aplomb. While Their Purple Moment would be influential to further works, most obviously Sons of the Desert (1933), Ollie is here the one who loses his nerve and blabs to the respective wives, while earlier Stan is smarter than he would later become. A good work. The aforementioned Should Married Men Go Home? and the follow-up, Early To Bed both offer differing takes on the Stan-Ollie relationship. One backdrop to their films is that these are two guys who really do love one another, a touching emotional attachment that enables us to love them too. Just think of the third act of Laughing Gravy, or Ollie prepared to risk his life at the end of the desolate Below Zero. Yet in the first of these two shorts they don’t even seem to like each other, while the second has no adequate resolution to a Hardy drunk on inherited money and making an unwilling slave out of Stan. They’re both very fine shorts in themselves, but lack that note of affection. Continuing the recurring instances of the silents being reused for the sound era, then the best moments of Should Married Men Go Home? were reworked into Come Clean (1931) and Men O’ War (1929). These didn’t include the bizarre climax of a female mud wrestling match in a film that’s so blasé about its attitude towards female violence that it even has an unlikeable version of Ollie stopping himself from slugging his wife! On the same token, his cruel wealthy take in Early To Bed has him talking about a beautiful maid, with the shocking detraction “But she’s Chinese.” Two Tars has such a relentless degree of high-octane action violence it could almost be an 80s movie starring Schwarzenegger. Men are hurled at cars, which then fall over, doors and fenders are torn to shreds and objects are hurled through windscreens. It’s an impressive feat, and perfectly demonstrates one of the many unwritten laws in Laurel and Hardy’s universe: when someone is about to perform an act of violence against you, you don’t attempt to stop them, but instead stand back and see how inventive that violence is going to be. The short was rumoured to have been planned as a three-reeler under the name of Two Tough Tars, but scenes were deleted and can only be found in stills. It also has something of a reputation of a Laurel and Hardy all-time classic, up there with the thematically similar Big Business (1929), something I was glad I didn’t know before I’d seen it. With that in mind it would have struck me as anti-climatic. Without it, Two Tars is one of their free-wheeling, plotless best. Hardy had been seen in thirteen films during 1928, including a nine-month holdback of Flying Elephants (1927) and two solo works - Galloping Ghosts and Barnum and Ringling Inc. With only the two middle Summer months absent in the cinemas, they finished December ’28 with two products – Habeas Corpus on the 1st and We Faw Down on the 29th. Habeas Corpus is a testament to the sophistication so often overlooked in Laurel and Hardy. While they play towards the everyman, having a corpse-moving that not only puns on the word “Corpse” but also refers to a Latin expression (habeas corpus ad subjiciendum, meaning "you [shall] have the body to be subjected to [examination]”) shows a far wider reach than low brow filler. Of course, while the real Habeas Corpus was a prerogative writ requiring the addresses to produce a custodial person in a court of law, here the body is a real dead body. In their most macabre film ever, one that would make The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case and Oliver the Eighth look like light romps, they’re employed by a mad scientist to dig up a rotting corpse. The reason why is not explored and quite incidental, but even taking into account the vast immorality of the boys in this one, it all matters little. That’s because, to be frank, Habeas Corpus is a pretty poor film, almost exclusively derived of anything approaching a laugh. With the horror element it allows Stan and Ollie to indulge in a very unnaturalistic style of silent film acting – in fact, there’s more shameless mugging to camera than Robin Asquith in a whole series of Confessions films. Thankfully, We Faw Down is a fine bow out to the year, with character pouring through every frame. Stan is marginally different than usual, smarter than the norm and also crueler ("- She’s too fat! -") but this is Stan and Ollie as we know them - or would come to know them - finishing off a variable presentation of shorts with them up to their necks in trouble, and even Stan claiming he could think up a better excuse to get out of it than Ollie...