I worry about Stan and Ollie. Are they too genteel for the new Millennium? Do they move at too slow a pace for the attention-deficit-disordered generations of today? Are they just too damned nice and decent to exist in our world today? I fear the answer to all the above is a resounding 'yes'.
Too bad; if you are not familiar with Laurel and Hardy films, especially the brilliant early work at the Hal Roach studio, then there is a big gap in your heart. They were unique, the only major silent comedy stars to actually become bigger when sound came along. Technically they were never signed as a team, at least during their heyday. Hal Roach can take credit for combining the two but he always had them signed to separate contracts, thus ensuring they couldn't bargain together to raise their price.
At the Nestor household, the release of the movie 'Stan & Ollie', starring Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly as the duo, is a big fucking event. You could guarantee that we'd be seeing it ASAP. Sure enough, on a brisk Saturday afternoon, the two of us made our way to the cineplex. When it started, I got teary eyed. By the end, I was bawling like a baby.
It was a superb movie, with at least as much historical accuracy as 'Bohemian Rhapsody', another one we saw and enjoyed this winter. There were slight fudging of facts, but nothing too distorting, all done to re-enforce the emotional payoff at the end of the story. Coogan and Reilly were exceptional; at no time in the movie was I aware of them in the role. They slipped invisibly into the parts. In fact, my wife asked about the 'Robin Hood' footage, a plot point that I won't spoil. I had to tell her that it was a fantasy recreation of something Stan wrote but they never actually performed in front of a camera.
The best thing about 'Stan & Ollie' is that it didn't sugar coat the pair. These were flawed men. By showing them at the height of their popularity first, flirting with the girls, placing bets, lining up parties, you see them as real people, with appetites. Then cutting to sixteen years later, you can't help but notice than Ollie has gained about a hundred pounds. It's also clear that they both went through some bad marriages and that Stan and a problem with alcohol.
That's not the point; instead, as my wife declared as we were leaving, it's a love story. Only this time, it's between two men, completely platonic. There's scene near the end, when Hardy falls ill, and Laurel goes to comfort him in his hotel room. By the end of the scene, the two are under the covers together, just like in one of their shorts. There's nothing sexual about it, miraculously. It was there that my tears started falling.
The best thing that I can say about the movie, and I absolutely loved it, is that it is exactly in the style and sensibility of a Laurel and Hardy film. There is conflict, there are wives and promoters, but the film doesn't try to be modern. No fart jokes, no blows to the nads. The boys know that they are getting ripped off but are too gentlemanly to mention it most of the time.
Stan Laurel was rather ineffectual as a business manager. They really weren't an official team until 1939, with 'Block Heads'. Hardy was pressured into appearing with old silent star Harry Langdon in 'Zenobia', but it's clear that he is trying hard not to make it a new paring. The last eight films they did after leaving Roach, between 1941 and 1945 for Fox and MGM, are terrible. Let's not even mention the 1951 French film 'Atoll K', otherwise known as 'Utopia', which is nearly unwatchable.
'Stan & Ollie' catches the team at the sunset of their lives, when, faced with the end of their partnership, they suddenly realize what they had. It would be useful to go back to the beginning, when Stan Laurel came over to America on the same boat as Charlie Chaplin. It took a few more years, but he too wound up in Hollywood. One of the many Chaplin imitators, which included Harold Lloyd and Charlies brother Sydney, Stan banged around with little success. Roach kept him around as a gag man, bit part player, and occasional director.
Oliver Hardy wasn't even a comedian, instead a supporting player. Because of his size, he was more apt to be playing the heavy, for obvious reasons. Blessed with a wonderful singing voice, he did everything in entertainment at least once but didn't get the kind of repetitive training on stage that Laurel, whose father was also in vaudeville, had. Ollie was as likely to be doing carpentry as be in front of the camera at the studio.
Exactly when the duo were considered a team is unclear; they started appearing in films together as early as 1921 but did not assume their personas until around 1927. Hal Roach always took the credit, but most people think it was Leo McCarey, then starting out on the Roach lot as a director, who saw the potential in the two. Since McCarey also worked with W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, as well as winning multiple Oscars, I suspect it was him. Roach, while undoubtedly talented, could be a handful, as when he went into business with Mussolini during the 1930s.
By 1926, the two were being put into shorts together constantly by McCarey, but not quite assuming their screen personalities. Silent comedy was a fast and loose genre, often slapped together from a few gags, only needing to be twenty minutes long. Laurel's mind was an encyclopedia of material, so he worked with both the writers and directors. Babe Hardy would show up unprepared, but it was his timing that made all the difference in the world.
Laurel may have constructed the joke, but Hardy got two more laughs out of it. As a team, Laurel & Hardy perfected the comedic 'Rule of Three', which states that you can get three laughs from one gag. The situation would be set up, usually by Laurel trying to get Hardy to perform some foolish task. Hardy would look into the camera, breaking the fourth wall, letting you know that he thought it wasn't a good idea, then agree anyway.
The event would occur and disaster strikes, usually to Hardy's dignity. That would be the second laugh. Then, as the dust settled, there would be Hardy, looking at the camera from within a pile of rubble, disgust on his face. Three laughs, but only one was in the script. They did it all the time, and it worked like a charm.
There was really only one gag in all their movies; Both Laurel and Hardy were idiots, but Hardy always thought he was the smarter of the two. The joy was in sitting back and waiting for the calamity to occur. It always did, and it almost always happened to Hardy.
It's too bad that seeing the silent shorts of Laurel & Hardy is so difficult today. Virtually all the sound material is easily available. but the silent are faster paced, relying completely on visual gags. The duo are younger, Hardy more agile, better at the physical aspects of the humor. Watching these silent, you see the personalities emerge, a symbiotic relationship.
That any silent films still exist is a miracle. The movie studios did all they could between the 1930s to the 1950s to destroy their own legacy, believing that the silent were in competition with the newer product. It took two men, William K. Everson and Robert Youngson, to start the first preservation efforts in the late 1950s. Everson, an Englishman who emigrated to America in 1950, was an avid collector of silent, eventually amassing and thus saving over 4,000 films. He produced television specials and taught university-level film classes, among the first to do both.
It was his groundbreaking books, full of gorgeous illustrations, that brought silent films back into public consciousness during the 1960s. As a story to illustrate how difficult it could be for Everson, he wrote an article in 1959 critical of the remake of 'Ben Hur', which, having won around ten Oscars, was being called the greatest film ever made. Everson noted that all the crucial scenes, including the chariot race, were in the original silent version. In the article, he stated that he owned a copy of the silent and was willing to screen it for anyone interested at his Manhattan apartment. MGM, the studio that owned the rights to both versions, had the FBI chase him instead for copyright violations. He had to furtively move his mammoth collection to keep it safe.
Robert Youngson was a producer of short subjects, mostly newsreels, the way people were given current events before the invention of the 6 o'clock news on television. When he was let go because of the downsizing of the studios, he turned to his equally formidable collection of silent films, mostly comedy shorts, and started making compilations. While not the first to do it, he played the films at the correct speed, treating them with respect. They proved to be wildly popular, both as first run features and later on television.
A year or two ago, they finally got around to restoring one of Youngson's compilation, 'When Comedy Was King'. I had fond memories of seeing this as a child, so I bought it. Some of the shorts featured only exist in this compilation, the originals now dissolved. After Chaplin and Keaton, it ends the only way it could, with a complete showing of Laurel & Hardy's 'Big Business'. This classic silent, where the boys are selling Christmas trees door to door, ending in both the catastrophic destruction of their Model T and an entire bungalow, is a perfect comedy short, hilarious from first frame until the last. Nothing could possibly top it.
Strangely, when sound technology required that the action in their shorts be slowed down to capture audio, Laurel & Hardy's popularity exploded when all other silent stars faded. Not verbal comics, they still managed to deliver their lines to hilarious effect. The Roach Studio survived on their fortune, along with the Our Gang comedies. Laurel was eventually able to fight his way to Associate Producer status, thus ensuring a little more money. Hardy, alimony and gambling debts piling up, was one of the biggest stars in the world yet living hand-to-mouth.
After the glory days were done, the two had to go on the road to make a living. Stan was a recovering alcoholic with diabetes. Hardy was morbidly obese. They still packed the houses every night, especially in Europe, where television hadn't destroyed vaudeville. That's where the new film 'Stan & Ollie' comes in, compressing true things that happened on both the 1947 and 1953 tours into one narrative. It is a wonderfully gentle and emotional film about a friendship that becomes platonic love. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Another film that we saw over Christmas was 'The Favorite'. Spoiler alert; disguised as a period English drama, it's really about a lesbian bottom learning how to be a lesbian top, complete with some pretty squeamish moments. Not terrible, but certainly not worthy of ten Oscar nominations.
The biopic of Laurel & Hardy, IMHO an infinitely finer film, didn't receive a single nomination. Like I said in the opening, in our new millennium, I worry about Stan and Ollie. Perhaps the world is not nice enough for two such gentle souls.
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