I was writing here the other day about Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and the 2000 Year Old Man. Phil Zeman, a reader of this blog, informs me that those of you unfamiliar with the glories of the 2000 Year Old Man have a rare opportunity to experience him...and for free! Just go to this link and give a listen.
Want to see great comedians not at their best? Tonight, Turner Classic Movies is giving you a couple of opportunities.
At 3:30 AM — check your schedule to make sure it's not different where you are — they're running The Horn Blows at Midnight, the 1945 movie that Jack Benny always claimed ended his movie career. It's kind of a silly fantasy and it's far from prime Benny...but it isn't awful. The film became a running gag on his radio show and later, his TV program. They did jokes about catching wanted criminals and, as punishment, making them sit through The Horn Blows at Midnight. It's nowhere near that gruesome and much of it is quite delightful, plus it has Margaret Dumont in a rare non-Marx appearance. Well worth seeing once.
TCM is following that with Block-Heads, a 1938 Laurel & Hardy comedy that for a time, looked like the end of their movie careers, too. It's a short (less than an hour) feature that like many of their pictures, starts out as one movie and then changes premises mid-stream. At the outset, it reminds one of two earlier Harry Langdon military comedies, The Strong Man and Soldier Man...and that may be because Langdon was one of the writers on Block-Heads. So that may be where the plot about Laurel being a World War I vet came from.
But wherever it came from, it quickly disappears. The movie suddenly turns into a remake of one of the umpteen films Stan and Ollie did where a jealous husband walks in on an innocent scene between his wife and Laurel and/or Hardy and thinks there's hanky-panky in progress. As much as I love The Boys, I never warmed to those storylines and this one is more contrived than most. Still, they were at their peak as comedic performers...and their peak was, to me, higher than anyone else's ever. So in spite of the plot, they're wonderful to watch.
Alas, audiences didn't concur when Block-Heads was previewed before audiences. The reaction showed that some rewriting, refilming and further editing were needed. That was not unusual — they did some of that on most of their movies after the first previews — but this time, it was more difficult. Mr. Laurel was having problems in his personal life and he disappeared and was unavailable. Not only was his expertise in comedy writing and editing absent but so was his body. How do you do reshoots on a Laurel & Hardy film without Laurel? The folks at the studio whipped up a few new brief scenes with Mr. Hardy and filmed a whole new end gag (actually, a repeat of one from an earlier film) using stand-ins.
The movie was, from all reports, improved...and yes, I know. A lot of Laurel & Hardy fans consider the end-product one of their best efforts. But I don't and it's my weblog so that's what it's going to say here...though I hasten to point out again that even Laurel and Hardy at their worst is worth watching. And this is far from their worst.
As I said, it was also (almost) their last. Hal Roach's contract to release Laurel & Hardy movies through MGM had ended and Laurel was in absentia. This led to the announcement that the team was kaput. Here's a news item that ran at the time. If the type is too small on your screen, you can click on it and make it bigger...
Langdon's movie career had declined to the point where he was working as a gagman for Laurel & Hardy. There's some question among historians about how serious Roach and his associates were about creating a Langdon & Hardy team. It seems to have been more of a publicity stunt and a threat to get Mr. Laurel to behave. In any case, the next movie Oliver Hardy made — Zenobia — did not have Laurel and in it and did have Langdon though they were in no sense an on-screen team...just two actors in the same movie.
By the time they filmed Zenobia, Laurel had dealt with his problems and was ready to get back to work. What stopped him was that he and Hardy had always had separate contracts with the Hal Roach Studio, expiring at different times. This seriously limited their negotiating strength since when one's deal was up, that person couldn't credibly threaten to take his partner and go to another studio. Laurel decided to wait until Hardy's current pact was over and thereafter, they would sign only as a team. While waiting for that to happen, Hardy appeared in Zenobia, and audiences shrugged. Nice enough...but they didn't want Oliver without Stanley. Roach then made a deal with United Artists to release more Laurel & Hardy movies and another deal with those men as a unit and that's pretty much the history. Don't let anything I've written here stop you from watching Block-Heads. Like I always say, even weak Laurel & Hardy is better than no Laurel & Hardy.
This will primarily be of interest to folks who lived in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies...
Like all of America back then, we always had at least one radio team trying to be Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding. In every town, two guys at some station would pair up (most of the time, a disc jockey and a news guy) and they'd do a show — usually a morning show — with bogus interviews, recurring characters and (always) a fake ongoing soap opera. Some of these Bob & Ray simulators shamelessly ripped off actual Bob & Ray material. Others just took the idea of two guys being funny between records and ran with it.
We had many such teams in L.A., some of which lasted for weeks, others of which lasted seemingly forever. Hudson & Landry were probably the second longest-running act and the first, inarguably, was Lohman & Barkley. Al Lohman and Roger Barkley were a duo for about 25 years, starting at KLAC and then moving to KFWB and then to KFI. Barkley was the straight man and Lohman did the silly voices and while they sometimes came perilously close to doing Bob & Ray bits, I never heard them actually do one. At times, they were very funny, especially when something would happen to knock them off their semi-prepared material.
I wrote some things for them at KFI, more for fun than money since they paid less than what it cost in gas to drive my little jokes down to the studio. They were nice, genial guys but my lasting impression of them — derived from spending a bit of time there and also following their careers — was a deep frustration that they'd become successful in what they knew was a declining industry...and they were unable to parlay that success into anything else. They tried hosting game shows, acting in movies, doing two-person stand-up, recording comedy albums...and nothing worked out but the radio gig. In the early seventies, the local NBC affiliate had them host a late night comedy talk show that was as hilarious and clever as anything I've ever seen on TV. It was basically a talk show where so many things went wrong that they never got around to asking any of their guests a single question. My friends and I were deeply disappointed when it was cancelled after not-very-many episodes. I wish I had copies of them but I've never heard of anyone having more than a few brief clips. I fear those shows no longer exist.
The partnership ended abruptly in May of 1986. Right in the middle of a broadcast one day, Barkley suddenly decided he'd had enough of it. He got up during a commercial, walked out of the studio and that was the end of the act. They reportedly never spoke again. Barkley became a solo radio personality at another station. Lohman tried a couple of different partners but it wasn't the same. Both men have since passed away.
I recently found this little profile piece on them from, it says, 1980. It gives a little taste of who they were and what they did. And much to my surprise, there's a joke in there about self-deprecating humor that I believe they got from me. Or maybe I got it from them. Anyway, it's a line I've been using since high school and I think I came up with it on my own...but who knows? Maybe I heard it one day listening to Lohman & Barkley. I sure wouldn't have been the only person to steal from them. Or Bob & Ray.
November 23, 2009
