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 1929 Liberty (18m) Wrong Again (19m) That’s My Wife (18m) Big Business (18m) Double Whoopee (18m) Bacon Grabbers (19m) Angora Love (20m) Directors: Leo McCarey (1,2); Lloyd French (3); James W. Horne (4) and Lewis R. Foster (5-7) DVD Availability: Try sendit.com/amazon Viewpoint: "- If you must exercise - exercise quietly -" A bonus with the 1929 silents is that three of them still exist with their original sound effects and music. While even the earlier sound shorts remain in their redubbed state (largely with the KuKu theme overdubbed before its 1930 introduction), then Liberty, Wrong Again and That’s My Wife can be heard as they were meant to be heard. Liberty is a magnificent body of work, one which effortlessly plays with, yet again, music hall and vaudeville traditions of homosexuality, though allows it to seem innocent by having Stan and Ollie unmindful of their situation. The situation? To spend the entire short attempting to change their trousers, and getting chased by assorted cops. If you so wished, it would be possible to assume that each “career” version of the boys is linked, thus giving us about a dozen or so alternate Laurel and Hardys. Take them as sailors… are Bert and Alf from Our Relations the same “bad lads” who wrecked cars in Two Tars? Here the Stan and Ollie on the run could easily be the same two convicts as in The Second Hundred Years. One thing perhaps cruelly wasted is the climax, which makes you marvel at how good the back projection is. The actual truth of the matter is they really were up that high! A special three-storey set was built upon the top of the 150 foot Western Costume Company building with just a platform (which didn’t take Ollie’s weight!) and a safety net. Filming this one in October 1928, the same year Ollie could also be seen with pianos and horses on his back, while the earlier, sound-free Stan does seem to genuinely endanger his health with some of the more outrageous physical situations they put themselves into. All this, and – despite Hal Roach studios making a profit of over one-and-a-half million – Stan was paid $33,150 and Ollie $21,166. (Plus 67 cents!) If their enthusiasm was dented by their lack of genuine financial success, then they didn’t show it, even though their salaries would often get worse, not better, as the depression came around. The next two films in the series are both one-joke shorts. Yet fortunately for Wrong Again and That’s My Wife, both jokes are very funny and are performed by two technically outstanding operators. Sometimes it’s just little silly things, like the absolutely ridiculous you-couldn’t-dream-it-up-except-someone-did premise of Wrong Again that sees Stan and Ollie take a horse to a mansion and place it on top of a piano instead of a painting. When the real painting turns up (and note how early versions of Ollie find amusement rather than exasperation in their colossal gaffes) Stan has a look behind a curtain to clarify the mistake in his own mind. There’s a horse. In a house. On top of a piano. And Stan needs a second look just to remind himself exactly what it is. Even funnier is the shockingly risqué That’s My Wife. For someone not previously acquainted with the silent shorts (in the UK it’s only the Hal Roach talkies – and, oddly, The Flying Deuces - that make it to TV) then it’s stunning how far removed from innocent, kid-friendly Laurel and Hardy this is. Ollie spends the majority of the movie with his hand down Stan-as-his-wife’s pants, gyrating furiously. The not-at-all disguised gag is that everyone who accidentally encounters them assumes that Ollie is trying to put his hand in his “wife’s” knickers and roger “her” from behind! This silent was Lloyd French’s first directing duty on a Laurel and Hardy film, and although he would go on to do seven more (including uncredited work on Pack Up your Troubles and Scram!) he’s noticeably stiffer here, though still fine. In terms of direction then Leo McCarey gets the honours for this selection, with Lewis R. Foster the most staid. The Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) is a curious cross-section of opinion and fact, with the opinions sometimes being more reliable than the fact, and the fact sometimes being more unreliable than the opinion. Allowing visitors to the site to vote for the quality of a film between 0 and 10, only regular voters get their votes considered for a total “Top 250” rating, meaning that no Laurel and Hardy films ever quite make it. (One ignominious entry is that Hardy’s 1925 version of The Wizard of Oz saw out 2004 as being voted the second-worst film of the 1920s. Poor Ollie!) The reason for mentioning it? While scores and votes are transient, liable to change from day to day, Big Business’s clear lead of an 8.29 mean weighted average means it’s unlikely to ever be toppled as THE classic Laurel and Hardy movie. Forget The Music Box (second with 7.91 in December 2004) or Sons of the Desert (8th with a comparatively lowly 7.65), Big Business is the connoisseur’s Laurel and Hardy film, a surprise success with the general public (or at least, the general public that is more film literate than average, presumably), the same public that consigned Way Out West only a place in the top dozen. (If you really want to know, then the rest of the top ten saw Helpmates at 3, Tit For Tat/Them Thar Hills in fourth and fifth position accordingly, Towed in a Hole at 6, Liberty at 7, and Two Tars/Hog Wild taking up the final two positions). Yet it’s not just with the sort-of general public that the film scores, as critics have continually cited it as an upstanding example of Laurel and Hardy’s artistry. Naturally, actually seeing the thing will lead to an inevitable sense of anti-climax, and no film could live up to the reputation of “funniest comedy ever made”. With that in mind, I would like to watch it a few more times, but frankly it left me a little cold. There’s some great material in there (like the bit where Stan and Ollie load up their van just to drive around the corner!) but the violence involved isn’t well motivated enough to be realistic or exaggerated enough to be cartoonish… it falls somewhere in between. I guess it depends which version of Laurel and Hardy you love, but here they seem more malicious and spiteful than I’ve ever seen them. No longer innocent victims reacting like a scolded child, they wilfully cause harm and upset, James Finlayson left impotently jumping on the remains of their already-smashed car while they get to find more and more of his property to wreck. I think the point at which me and the short parted company was Stan’s first attack. Finlayson cuts up their tree, so Stan responds by cutting off his house numbers with a pen knife – all well and good. Yet Stan then goes further and actually uses said penknife to hack off the woodwork around the door frame. That’s not reciprocal destruction – that’s excessive vandalism. All of a sudden the film has jumped from what promised to be an ever-escalating scale of destruction into unwarranted thuggery. What also holds things back is that although Fin’s chimney gets wrecked, his house remains standing. Am I a heretic for wishing that A. Events had started more gradually?; and B. Fin had more of Stan and Ollie’s stuff to smash up in return, while they raised his house to the ground? Similarly morally askew, Bacon Grabbers - the weakest of their final year of silents – sees them cast as debt collectors. What next? Laurel and Hardy in “The Bailiffs”? Stan and Ollie star as “The Traffic Wardens”? Things seem a little forced and rigidly directed in this one, where the sympathy has to go with the poor guy who’s just behind on his rent. As for the denouement – who was driving that steam roller, Stevie Wonder? A radio I can understand, but a steam roller that drives over an entire car? (And, in budget-saving mode – this looks cheaper than the rest of the year’s offerings – we don’t even get to see the car crushing itself). Bacon Grabbers is by no means awful, but does suffer from a laboured intention to the comedy… here Stan and Ollie take over a minute just to leave a room! Double Whoopee is average for the period – ie. well made and very funny – while Angora Love was the basis for Laughing Gravy and, to a lesser extent, The Chimp. With a lot of these films I’m amazed at the way the animals are treated in the days before AHA, and it has to be said that the goat does look marginally distressed at times. Still, a nice end to a fine year, with Liberty and – on a more mainstream level - That’s My Wife the real stand-outs for me. Yet this wasn’t where 1929 ended. To go with the seven silents released during the year, six sound shorts were produced. Most of them (Berth Marks in particular) could easily have been silents, though the first (Unaccustomed As We Are) showed great ambition with dialogue and had two comedians with voices that were instantly perfect for their characters. From this point on, An Online Mess You’ve Got Me Into! looks at Laurel and Hardy’s movies not from the point of overviews, as I’ve done with the silents, but on an individual, title-by-title basis – and then only when the movie has suitably inspired. However, the rest of 1929’s output is looked upon and mused over in the reviews of Unaccustomed As We Are, Perfect Day and They Go Boom!.