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"

Helpmates Year: 1932 Directed by: James Parrott Duration: 20m DVD Availability: Try sendit.com (region 2 only) Viewpoint: "Would you mind closing the door? I'd like to be alone." If you were to draw up a chart of the five dumbest things ever associated with Laurel and Hardy then there’s certainties that would make such a chart. How about getting an impersonator to dub over the silents to make them “talkies”? What about making these human cartoons into… er, a 166 episode cartoon series and spin-off comic strip for the kids? Then there’s the time they commissioned a “new” Laurel and Hardy film… decades after Stan and Ollie died. (See For Love Or Mummy for that one). Maybe the dumbest thing of all was the time Stan and Ollie themselves said “Hey, let’s sign a contract with 20th Century Fox.” Probably the least offensive of a top five – yet still, to carry the theme, completely dumb – was the idea to “colorize” their movies. This was presumably done in an attempt to make them appeal to a younger generation – what’s wrong with just beating the younger generation with a stick until they learn discipline? That discipline involves sitting down and watching humorous shorts shot in fine b & w hues which push the finest of them nearly in the realm of art. It doesn’t involve saying “Mummy, this film is so much funnier now I can see Stan’s quilt was mauve and purple.” It CERTAINLY doesn’t involve saying “Mummy, did Stan and Ollie have their collars done up too tight? Why are their faces that funny-looking, too-pink colour?” Why the rant in a review of Helpmates? Well – apart from the fact that I haven’t really got a lot to say about the film itself – this was the very first short to undergo the process. In fairness, this one doesn’t look so bad, though, as is often the case, the master copies available at the time of their creation weren’t generally as good as the remastered contemporary black and white versions. Not only are the prints inferior, but cropped images and edited material are also often the order of the day. If you can accept the essential heresy of colorizing black and white film, then technically most of them are extremely poor anyway, not least this washed-out version which has 1’20m of excised material. Look out for the opening which replaces the beautiful albeit wobbly tracking shots of Ollie’s trashed house with still shots. Okay, okay, the film itself. Maybe in some ways it speaks of the problems associated with learning too much about the real lives of the people involved. For instance, I was reading John McCabe’s biography of Hardy the day before I rewatched this one, and came across the anecdote about Ollie – by all accounts mild-mannered in general – fracturing a man’s arm with a pool cue. Fellow actor Tyler Brooke had called Hardy – reputedly in humour – a “son of bitch”, provoking the attack. It was around the time they were shooting their last two silents/first short (14th March 1929) that a law suit was filed, a suit that Ollie settled out of court. With this firmly in mind, it makes it harder to watch one of Ollie’s more physically aggressive performances, just as his real-life gambling excesses make you double-take at his mentions of having lost all of his spending money “in a poker game”. But I’m putting off what I really want to say, and that is that Helpmates – one of the most-lauded Laurel and Hardy films of all, revered by all fans and a perennial top three favourite on their IMDb entry – is great but perhaps a little overrated. Yes, there are many, many funny moments – Stan’s self-amused reaction to his “I’m not going to get married”; the plunger-in-the-eye scene that wouldn’t be out of place in Zombie Flesh Eaters (or Zombi 2 for the purists out there); “Isn’t she sweet?”/“Charming!”; Stan’s going over the “sense” conversation. Even Ollie signing a telegram is hilarious in Hardy's more than capable hands. Then, of course, the end. What particularly amuses me about one of (the?) greatest endings of all Laurel and Hardy films is that Ollie actually has to do a double-take – “take it big” in fact – that his house has been burnt to the ground. He’s fallen through the floorboards and there’s only charred cinders left of the entire structure – yet he has to look twice to take it in. Genius. Also, Stan’s “cry” (first used in his solo one-reeler , 1919) was never funnier than his final one here. Maybe what holds the film back a little is that it can often be quite stolid, with Parrott’s customary rigid blocking and uncertain direction preventing any real energy or spontaneity to enter the piece. In particular, while Stan is firing on all cylinders, Ollie’s performance sometimes feels forced and laboured, unusually so for such a comic talent. You can at least have fun placing Ollie’s twisted sword next to events in Oliver The Eighth and Below Zero for a Freudian interpretation of events... and oh, two last things - there's a surreal moment where Stan arrives at Ollie's front door fully dressed just seconds after having spoken to him on the phone; and the "picking off lint" ending was Hardy's own invention, and is, of course, a complete understanding of character and quite, quite brilliant.