Category Archives: Laurel & Hardy

Another Nice Memory

Posted on Friday, December 25, 2009 at 11:48 AM

marchofthewoodensoldiers

Our pal James H. Burns writes a nice little piece for the Village Voice about a treasured holiday recollection: Watching Laurel and Hardy in March of the Wooden Soldiers. And a great little movie it is, too. In fact, I remember that when it was colorized, film buffs who ordinarily decry that process as vandalism either didn't notice or didn't object too strenuously. It's such a colorful film in its original black-and-white that a lot of folks thought it was always in color.

Today's Audio Link

Posted on Sunday, August 16, 2009 at 9:18 PM

My favorite performers in the history of mankind are, as we all know, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. I've seen all their movies eighty quadrillion-zillion times…but did you know they almost got into radio? In 1944, they did a pilot for what was intended as a weekly series called The Laurel and Hardy Show.

It was performed and transcribed at NBC Studios on March 6 of that year but apparently never broadcast. The way it generally worked in radio was that a show would be done that way and then someone would take the disks around to advertising agencies and potential sponsors and if one was willing to buy, the program went onto the air. The Laurel and Hardy Show never did, presumably because a sponsor could not be found.

The premise of the show was that each week, The Boys would get a new job…and by the end of the half-hour, they would have botched things up and become unemployed again. The pilot episode was titled, "Mr. Slater's Poultry Market" and at the end of it, it's teased that next week, they'll be getting into the plumbing business. But of course, there was no next week.

The script is not wonderful…but this was '44 when Stan and Ollie were doing not-wonderful scripts for MGM and Fox, resulting in movies that were similarly not wonderful. As with the films, the radio script makes them somewhat stupider than they were in their best pictures and there's a lot of over-reacting to plot contrivances. Still, it's a shame their radio show didn't sell. Both men could have used the additional income…and maybe stardom there would have given them a little more clout in dealing with MGM and Fox. Alas, here's all that resulted from the endeavor…

Laurel and Hardy and Laurel and Hardy

Posted on Monday, September 25, 2006 at 10:53 AM

Turner Classic Movies, God love 'em, is running one of the best Laurel and Hardy features on Wednesday morning. Our Relations airs at 10:45 AM on my coast. You can figure out when it's on where you are. It's scheduled for an hour and forty-five minute time slot even though the movie only runs 73 minutes, so that probably means at least one short subject immediately follows. TCM is sneaking in some real treasures this way so you might want to take that into consideration if you set your TiVo or DVR or VCR.

By contrast, the Fox Movie Channel is running what I consider the most disappointing Laurel and Hardy feature — The Bullfighters — early the morning of Saturday, September 30. Then on the following Monday morn, they have The Big Noise, which isn't all that much better. Still, as we say around this website, weak Laurel and Hardy is better than…well, you know.

But getting back to Our Relations…this is a film about which I have two glorious memories which I'll share with you here. If you don't like it, you can go to some other weblog.

Shortly after Stan Laurel died in 1965, a tribute film show was held at Royce Hall, which is on the U.C.L.A. campus: An evening of Laurel and Hardy films with Dick Van Dyke as host. How could any fan of Stan and Ollie pass that up? My parents and I went and I have a very vivid memory of Mr. Van Dyke arriving and taking a seat in the audience not far from us, sitting all by himself like any other attendee. Autograph seekers quickly engulfed him and I think this caused the folks running the evening to notice he was there and, in kind of an appropriate Rob Petrie way, in the wrong place. They scurried over and quickly led him to another seat that had been reserved for their guest speaker. To open the festivities, he made some brief and appropriate remarks, telling the story of how he'd first met Stan, of how much Stan had influenced him, and how Stan had lovingly critiqued a Laurel and Hardy impersonation on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

They then ran two shorts — The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case and The Music Box — followed by the feature, which was Our Relations. If you asked most fans of The Boys about those shorts, you'd hear that Murder Case is one of their lesser efforts and Music Box was them at their best. (It was the only one they made that won an Academy Award.) That night, an audience of mostly adults — but a fair amount of kids — howled at The Music Box but there was even more laughter for The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case. Make of that what you will.

Our Relations is a mistaken identity farce. Stan and Ollie are roaming around town. So are their twin brothers, Alf and Bert, who are seamen in town for the day. Neither set of twins knows that the other is about. The sailors pick up some floozies and later the floozies think Stan and Ollie are their dates…only Stan and Ollie are with their wives at the time so you can imagine what happens. Alf and Bert are also running around with a valuable ring that doesn't belong to them. The rightful owner and some gangster types think Stan and Ollie have it and this is already a lot more than you need to know. You've got two Laurels and two Hardys, plus Jimmy Finlayson and moviedom's eternal drunk, Arthur Housman. How could that not be terrific?

That night at U.C.L.A., it was, it was. I can think of maybe a dozen moviegoing experiences in my life when the entire audience — every single person around me — was totally consumed by laughter. I don't just mean a lot of people thought a movie was funny. That often happens. I'm talking about those too-rare times when it all gravitates to some higher plane and there's that sense of a very magical, special event taking place…something that transcends a mere cinematic experience. You're all part of it together, laughing at the same things at the same times and sharing that sense of giddy, helpless happiness. An awful lot of strangers walked out of Royce Hall that night, feeling they'd been among friends and experienced something memorable.

Four or five years later, I had another of those keepsake "everyone laughing together" evenings thanks to Our Relations. Elsewhere, you may have seen me write of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, which met weekly for a few years in the late sixties at Palms Recreation Center in West Los Angeles. I don't think I've mentioned that some of our members also had a monthly group that was called the Silent Movie Club until the night I am about to describe when we ran a sound film. Thereafter, it was the Old Time Movie Club…and proud of it.

Most meetings, the program consisted of 8mm silent movies from our personal collections of Blackhawk Films and other companies that sold what then constituted home video. I had and still have a bunch of such reels of Chaplin, Langdon, Keaton and others. I no longer have a projector on which to run them or any reason to do so but I still have them. The club's officers — Barry Siegel, Bruce Simon and Steve Finkelstein — had similar collections and you could see all our films at the club if you paid the modest admission. There was even live musical accompaniment, courtesy of a talented fellow named Jeff Gluckson at the Palms Park piano. Every few months, all of this put enough loot in the treasury to rent a 16mm sound feature and give Jeff a night off. When they decided to get one with Laurel and Hardy in it, I recalled that glorious evening at Royce Hall and demanded Our Relations.

The club's only publicity came from a small listing in the Los Angeles Times but that week, it yielded a full house…more than a full house. I think the seating capacity of the room was around 100 and we had at least 150 crammed in there. People were sitting on the floor, on the tables, on each other…and no matter how uncomfy they were, they all loved the film. I was wedged between a wall and an older, somewhat portly woman who was sharing the piano bench with someone and literally crying from laughing so hard. Every few minutes, she'd double over and topple off her half of the bench, falling onto me, all the time giggling so wildly she couldn't get her bearings to get up. There were moments there when I wished we were running The Bullfighters, instead.

Our Relations is a great comedy but it won't seem anywhere near that funny on Turner Classic Movies. You had to be there, had to be with not just an audience but the right audience. That's one of the things I miss with home video. DVDs and the cable channels give us the chance to have our favorite old films in our own homes, more or less on demand. They just don't give us the chance to have them the way the filmmakers intended: With an audience.

Langdon and Hardy

Posted on Sunday, January 1, 2006 at 9:56 AM

During the first dozen or so years that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made their wonderful movies for Hal Roach's studio, they were under separate contracts that expired at different times. This gave Roach a bit of bargaining leverage. When Stan's contract ended, it was not possible for Laurel and Hardy to threaten to go elsewhere since Ollie was still tied to that studio. So Laurel would re-up at a slight increase on the old terms and then a few months later when Hardy's contract ran out, he'd also have no choice but to sign again. Eventually, Stan decided that this had to stop; that even if they wound up staying with Roach, the two of them should negotiate as a unit and sign as a unit.

In 1938, Laurel and Hardy made Block-Heads for Roach. The filming did not go smoothly as Mr. Laurel was then beset with some personal (and unfortunately, publicized) problems in his home life. Since his latest contract was expiring, rumors spread that this would be the last Laurel and Hardy film. In reality though, Laurel was not only ready to work with Hardy again, he'd decided not to sign a new deal but instead to wait until Hardy was a free agent. This meant that for around six months, Roach had Hardy under contract but not Laurel. During that time, Oliver made a film without Stan — a quirky screwball comedy most often called Zenobia. It was also released in various countries as Elephants Never Forget, It's Springtime Again and Zenobia's Revenge. Never trust a movie with more titles than jokes.

In it, Mr. Hardy plays a country doctor who nurses a sick elephant back to health and is then unable to get rid of the beast. Cast as the elephant's handler was Harry Langdon, who had once been considered a peer of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton in silent comedy. By '39, that status was as defunct as silent pictures themselves, and Langdon was appearing in low budget comedies and also working as a gag writer for Laurel and Hardy. In fact, he was one of the writers of Block-Heads, the opening of which bears more than a slight resemblance to his 1926 classic, Soldier Man.

When gossip columnists heard that Hardy was making a film sans Laurel and with Langdon, they jumped to the not-illogical — but also not true — conclusion that Stan was out and that Zenobia would be the first in a series of Langdon and Hardy movies. The Roach studio seems to have decided that this was a good publicity angle, and perhaps a way to put a little pressure on Laurel, so little was done to discourage such speculations.

Zenobia is not a great film by any means. Hardy is quite good in a change-of-pace role that reminds you that he wasn't really that dumb guy who palled around with Mr. Laurel. He was an actor and a pretty good one, at that. Langdon is also fine in the film…but in no way are the two men teamed in the sense that Laurel and Hardy were teamed. They're merely two actors who happen to be in the same movie, and Langdon doesn't even have that much screen time. (Zenobia also features Stepin Fetchit and Billie Burke, among others. Ms. Burke did many things in many movies which no one remembers because she was the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.)

By the time Zenobia reached theaters, Stan and Ollie were back making movies together. They did an independent film called The Flying Deuces and then there was a new deal with Roach for a couple more pictures. Langdon was among the writers for these and he continued to appear in other films, including a series of shorts for Columbia and a few halting attempts to team him with actor-gagman Charley Rogers, who'd also written for Stan and Ollie. Langdon passed away in 1944.

Zenobia can be seen early Thursday, January 5, on Turner Classic Movies. It's on at 7:15 AM Eastern time so we're talking 4:15 in the morning on this coast. It will be preceded by The Flying Deuces, the movie which exists on more cheapo tapes and DVDs than any other movie ever made. We assume TCM will not be running one of the nineteenth-generation copies they sell at the 99-Cent Store.

John McCabe, R.I.P.

Posted on Wednesday, September 28, 2005 at 7:49 AM

Dr. John McCabe was the first and best historian of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy As I recounted in this article, he wrote the first book about them, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy, and it had a deep, positive impact on me. (When the piece was first published, it brought me a nice letter from Dr. McCabe. I have scarcely been happier to hear from anyone.) McCabe was the only biographer of Stan and Ollie to know both men — he was especially close to Laurel — and it was his writings that more or less inaugurated a wave of scholarship and appreciation of their films. He taught college courses about them, often as an overview of twentieth-century humor, and followed Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy with additional works on The Boys and he also authored books on Charlie Chaplin, James Cagney, George M. Cohan and others. In 1987, he married actress Rosina Lawrence, who co-starred opposite Laurel and Hardy in their 1937 movie, Way Out West, and they were wed until her passing ten years later. That's her in the photo above with him.

I'm sorry to report that Dr. McCabe passed away yesterday morning as he slept in his home in Mackinac Island, Michigan. I have no other info but I had to note the passing of a man whose work was so important to so many of us.