This is the one boys and girls; this is the one…
Following on from their definitive collections of Laurel & Hardy’s silent
classics from 1927 and 1928 comes Eureka Entertainment’s presentation of their
work in 1929 all presented in high definition for the first time in the UK.
Newly restored in 2K from the finest available materials,
this Blu-ray edition is absolutely essential viewing for anyone with a sense of
humour or in need of a laugh in this year when global politics (and football)
went fully slapstick. Not to overplay comedy or make light of anything or
any-one supposedly real, but this set contains eternal truths about love
and companionship that, clearly, have never been more relevant, never been more
needed in this age of performative cruelty. Stan or Ollie might poke you in the
eye or strip your chest hairs off with fly paper, but they do it with sincerity,
lost in the moments of petty humiliation that ultimately bring us together. You
may find yourself hiding a goat in your room or kidnapping a horse but there’ll
always be a lesson to be learned and even if you have to risk your lives on a
skyscraper just to change into each other’s trousers… what’s left but to laugh
and carry on.
Two moments from growing up… my Grandad Jim Joyce introducing me to Laurel & Hardy on our old black and white: “watch these lad, they’re really funny…” and, later, as a teen on a late bus in Liverpool watching a tipsy tramp fall over as he got on board saying: “it’s a shit brick la, it’s a shit brick …” looking me straight in the eye and smiling. We suffer daily in our ways but passing on these sentiments is the currency of resiliance – you can easily lose your dignity but who cares, who really cares when all we need to do is laugh. Laugh is all your need. Well, that and kindness: brotherly laughs.
Still, here the facts are clear and we see peak Stan and
ultimate Ollie in 1929 just as silence was giving way to sound, the two of them
riding a wave that would make that transition easy for the funniest people on
the planet. On film, at least…
Liberty (1929)
This film could have been called Putting Pants on
Ollie and after starting with clips of the American war of independence we
see our heroes as convicts on the run, diving into a getaway car and then
spending the rest of the film trying to get changed into their proper clothes.
This follows the usual self-contained logic of their and Leo McKay’s classics
as they go from one compromising situation to another before Harlow finds them
trying to swap their trousers in a cab. They end up high above the city after
running into a construction site lift.
Thus, hundreds of feet above the city, balanced
precariously on metal girders and with a crab in Oliver’s trousers – of course!
– the duo struggle to save themselves and it is dizzying and mesmerising with a
real sense of danger even though they are using a set-up on top of a building
with a safety mat – just like Harold Lloyd in Safety Last. The shots are
still hard to watch and, as the commentary from Chris Seguin and Kyp Harness
points out it’s like a surreal dream with Stan especially on the point of
falling either from a ladder tottering on a plank or when he grabs onto a loose
girder which sails out over the Culver City/Los Angeles sky attacked to a
crane. It’s a vertiginous ballet of near misses and mortal fear performed by
two men in their early forties yet fit as squirrels!
This set-up was constructed on top of the Hal Roach
Studios and this is also one of three of the films on this set to feature a teenage
Jean Harlow, here as the young woman encountering the in-cab trouser-swapping. Accompaniment
is from Maud Nelissen and there’s also the original Robert Youngson score,
newly restored by Stephen Horne which is fascinating to compare – musical
slapstick pattern recognition.
Wrong Again (1929)
This was Leo McCarey’s last hurrah as writer and principal
director of the duo (although he stayed involved on script, directorial
assistance and “brand advisor”) and it’s a surreal doozy with the boys trying
to claim a reward by returning a lost horse called Blue Boy from the
stables where they work, to a bewildered millionaire seeking a stolen painting
also called The Blue Boy. It’s an easy mistake to make and of course
they make it in style, anticipating rich reward for their act of kindness as
the mix up continues in surreal style at the owner’s mansion. No animals were
harmed in the making of this film, only human pride.
That’s My Wife (1929)
Lloyd French directs from a story by Leo McCarey and it’s time for Stanley to dress in drag to play Ollie’s wife so that his uncle will pay him inheritance due to his being “happily married”. Potentially meta, this one starts with Ollie’s clearly unhappily married wife (Vivien Oakland) leaves mainly due to the ever-presence of her husband’s best friend Stan, who seems oblivious. The two men then debate which of them should leave in order to restore balance but just as Mr Laurel is finally persuaded that he should quite his mate’s married home, up pops that Uncle who is so keen to see and reward his nephew’s marital bliss. Cue the wig and dress and a face that inly a drunken fellow diner could love as they head for a slap-up, slapstick meal and foot fights…
Big Business (1929)
AKA “the one with the Christmas trees”, directed by James
W. Horne, and in which our fir-tree friends try to make a sale with James
Finlayson who is not in the mood, not now and possibly not ever, for season’s
greetings. The violence, once again, is petty and what can the modern
sophisticate say except that comic life is still nasty, brutish and short-tempered.
Don’t try this at home with online AI Help Bots; just go after their programmers
– the guys who draw up the requirements and the specifications. Customer disservice
is always hilarious.
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| Der letzte Mann? |
Double Whoopee (1929)
Directed by Lewis R. Foster from another McCarey script,
this is one of the most famous shorts and not just because of the appearance of
rather more of Jean Harlow than might be expected, Double Whoopie is a
close to perfection as you can get – so many of these films are almost as close
– and sees the boys take jobs at a fancy hotel where defective lifts humiliate European
princes and pride comes before a fall in a game of tit for tat that escalates
from Ollie’s doorman to the front desk. I wondered if Murnau’s the Last
Laugh had been an influence on Ollie’s excess of esteem.
Bacon Grabbers (1929)
Lewis directs, Leo writes and there’s another glimpse of
Harlow at the very end of this one as she brings the first part of a double
whammy of punchlines that leaves the audience reeling. Stan and Ollie are
bailiffs tasked with recovering a radio from a late paying customer and hilarity
ensues as they try and serve him with his papers. Said customer is Edgar
Kennedy giving it the “slow burn” in response to the boys’ persistence… so many
of these films are explosive ending with the cathartic expressiveness of
Stanley’s weary look to camera. Here’s the inside out almost a century before
Disney’s Freudian cartoon.
Wikiparently, repo men were referred to as “bacon
grabbers”, short for “those who grab your possessions…” pigs who steal not squeal?
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| Oliver, Edgar Kennedy and Stanley |
Unaccustomed As We Are (1929)
This is the first sound comedy they made. This is the
first sound comedy anyone made! *
Now, this is an historic film representing as David Kalat
points out above* in his excellent commentary: the momentous debut of our
boys in sound. As a talkie he describes how it is a major film whereas this
silent version is slow in comparison with title cards delivering punchlines
when we can lipread the speed of the source dialogue. Soon Hal Roach could get
as much for a Laurel & Hardy sound short for as much as a full feature and
that’s the kind of multiple we can all get behind. Kalat remarks on their
accents but he’s wrong in saying that Laurel came from the same place as
Chaplin, he was a Lancastrian and not a Londoner and you can still trace the
region in his voice and his style. They grew up in the same theatres, but
London and Lancashire… dare I say we have a different sense of humour?
Guest star, and for the first time, is the lovely Thelma
Todd who was so popular she was paired with Zazu Pitts for a series of comedies
as well as later staring with the Marx Brothers. In Harlow fashion, she loses
her dress in a car door in This Is the Night (1932) and this element of
her act was already well established by that point and in this film, as many
others, she is soon down to her underwear and we can admire the figure that
helped her win Miss Massachusetts in 1925!
Edgar Kennedy plays her policeman husband and – always
suspicious – he turns to violence as retribution for the boys seeing too much
of his wife. The results work a little better in sound than silence but it’s
still a winning combination.
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| Trousers, again. Berth Marks. |
Berth Marks (1929)
This was the duo’s second talkie but here is the silent
version offered to picture houses that didn’t have sound and sees the boys as
two travelling musicians on their way to Pottsville… This, as so many of their
films were, is cross-referential and the expectations of mutually-assured
destruction set by Battle of the Century and furthered by Double Whoopee, are
taken to their logical extension here as, having blundered into a couple’s
sleeping carriage on the train, Stan is not aware of the suit-ripping mayhem
that is unleashed and only revealed in full at the end of the film. Chaos is
guaranteed but we know that and let’s do something new as well.
I very much enjoyed Andreas Benz’ organ accompaniment on
this and the above film, his lines are familiar ones from the versions I would
have seen in the 1960s and, being old enough to remember organs rising up in
front of screens in the Odeons of Liverpool and Blackpool, there’s a nostalgic
resonance that is very much of Stan Laurel’s original birth county of
Lancashire. With a piano there’s more light and shade and the organ has a more
defined sound which takes a lot of musical agility to accompany this kind of
quick-fire comedy. It works very well and gives a lovely warm hug to the boys
in excelsis!
Angora Love (1929)
Released on 14th December, this was the boys’
last silent film and it’s fair to say that they had perfected the art. I’ve
written about this film a few times before after live screenings (four times!)
and it absolutely one of their best as they try to conceal a goat hidden in
their apartment from their landlord – Mr Edward Kennedy again! There are 50
Ways to Leave Your Goat Herd…
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| That's not your wife Oliver... |
Now, for those of you with a sound set up, there are also
two 1929 talkies They Go Boom! and The Hoose-Gow which
show the development of the duo’s comedy with the added dimension which, as David
Kalat says, enabled them to speed their comedy up and develop now ways of
pushing forward their narrative and punchlines.
There’s a limited edition of 2,000 copies which you’ve
all probably ordered anyway and which includes an O-Card slipcase featuring new
artwork by Scott Saslow, a fulsome collector’s booklet featuring new notes
on each film by writer and comedian Paul Merton along with a new essay
on frequent collaborator James Finlayson by silent cinema expert Chris
Grosvenor.
In addition – deep breath - you get:
1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray from 2K restorations by
Blackhawk Films of all films
New scores:
Andreas Benz (That’s My Wife, Unaccustomed as
We Are and Berth Marks)
Neil Brand (Bacon Grabbers, Wrong Again and
That’s My Wife)
Gaylord Carter (Big Business)
Robert Israel (Angora Love, Big Business
and Double Whoopee)
Maud Nelissen (Big Business, Liberty)
There’s also an alternate musical scores on select shorts
including the Robert Youngson score for Liberty, newly restored by Stephen
Horne
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| Don't hang about: LIMITED EDITION!! |
New audio commentaries:
Liberty and Berth Marks by film writer Chris
Seguin and Kyp Harness, author of The Art of Laurel & Hardy:
Graceful Calamity in the Films
Double Whoopee, Unaccustomed as We Are and Wrong
Again by film historian and writer David Kalat
Big Business and Angora Love by silent film
accompanist Neil Brand
That’s My Wife and Bacon Grabbers by
Kennington Bioscope regular Glenn Mitchell, author of The Laurel and
Hardy Encyclopaedia
Unaccustomed As We Are alternate sound version
Alternate dubbed version of Double Whoopee
1929 sound shorts They Go Boom! and The
Hoose-Gow
New documentary by David Cairns and Fiona
Watson
The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (excerpt)
Crazy Heights – Alternate Super 8 version of Liberty
Super 8 versions of Big Business, Double
Whoopee and Angora Love
Stills Galleries
You can order direct from the Eureka website and,
frankly, no home should be without what are some of the finest comedies ever
put on screen! But you know that… "it"/"Life" may well be a "shit brick" at any moment but, even tossed onto our arses by outrageous fortune, this is laughter, this is (self) love!
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| There's Jean! |
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