Well, I haven’t posted on this blog nearly enough so I’d better post something and I thought I’d vaguely mention that recently I’ve been spending my lockdown watching the 20th Century Fox Laurel and Hardy films as I've had time to watch all the Hal Roach ones again and ... I'm running out of great films to fill the evenings with...
These films have a terrible reputation but actually they’re
not as bad as their reputation … Indeed, some of them – for example Jitterbugs –
when you actually watch them are as good as some of their earlier Hal Roach
output. For those of you who aren’t
obsessive Laurel and Hardy fans here’s a very quick backstory in case you need
it. From the late 1920s to the late
1930s Laurel and Hardy worked almost exclusively for producer Hal Roach who
hired them out to MGM occasionally as supporting artists in larger
productions. Roach had Stan and Ollie on
separate contracts timed to end and restart at different times with the aim of
preventing them negotiating with him as a team.
Towards the end of the 1930s Stan decided to break with this arrangement
and eventually they both went off to work at 20th Century Fox. However, largely due to the loss of creative
control this gave “the boys” these films are generally regarded as inferior.
Actually they’re not all that bad. Okay Great Guns is awful I won’t even review
it …
…but A-Haunting We Will Go is quite fun. Laurel and Hardy are sharing the star billing here with long forgotten magician Harry August Jansen (Dante the Magician) … both L&H and Dante are talents that the studio don’t seem to know how to utilise so have shoved together into a B-movie.
Like many B movies there is a gangster/crime plot that
drives events. Indeed, one gets the
impression that these stock plots weren’t intended as comedies at all but the
comedy and magic has been stuck on because they’re not good enough to be taken
seriously as serious drama. Lou Breslow
went on to write for Abbot and Costello (Well, somebody had to) and his
co-writer Stanley Rauh had previously been writing thrillers and romances. The result is an odd but amusing
muddle. Even Laurel and Hardy’s poorer
pictures have their moments – the opening of this film where Stan and Ollie are
exchanging pleasantries with the authorities having just been released from
prison only to suddenly both be simultaneously kicked up the arse and down the
prison steps is a masterpiece of comic timing.
There’s great fun to be had too as Hardy magically walks in and out of
two phone booths that seemingly teleport him between them much to his own
confusion … and the runabout farce at the end is enjoyably silly.
Jitterbugs holds up very well with a passable plot and Laurel and Hardy given a lot of latitude to broaden their characters. The plot is driven by pills that purportedly turn water into petrol – a concept that’s completely ridiculous but Laurel and Hardy are believably stupid enough to be taken in by. Hardy gets to be a southern gentleman and Laurel gets to do a bit of drag…
The Dancing Masters sounds an equally ridiculous concept but Laurel and Hardy just about get away with it. Part WWII propaganda film like Jitterbugs this carries on a trend of “the boys” getting mixed up with crazy inventors (this time it’s an invisible ray gun). It isn’t great but it isn’t as awful as it sounds … there’s something truly bizarre about L&H running a dance school. Again there is a gangster plot going on with one of the heavies played by a very young Robert Mitchum who looks as if he’s wandered in off the set of a film noir and onto the wrong sound stage by mistake…
In the Big Noise Laurel and Hardy (who work in a detective agency as cleaners) end up as minders to yet another mad inventor as all the good detectives are doing important WWII work. There’s some obviously reworked material here …notably from Oliver the Eighth … but some original twists are put on it. Where in Oliver the Eighth there’s an entire meal eaten as a mime because Mae Bush’s character is mad … here we have Laurel and Hardy eating an entire meal in synthetic pill form which is funnier than it sounds. The claustrophobic berth scene from Berth Marks (which also was kind of reworked for Pardon Us) is reworked yet again but it’s worth it for the remark of the person forced to share a bed with Oliver and Stan about Oliver – “Is this all one person?” which I found very funny for no logical reason… As a film this one hangs together quite well.
The Bullfighters is a bit weird but Stan gets to play a
double role which is fun. L&H are
detectives again for no really good plot reason – they’re on the hunt for a
fugitive but get nowhere. Well, the plot
reason is to make them run into a man who thinks they’re responsible for him
spending 20 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit who spends most of the
film threatening "Someday I'll run across them again! And when I do, I'm
going to skin them alive! First the little one, then the big one! I'm going to
skin them alive!!" Eventually this
does come to pass and we see Stan and Ollie walking down the corridor as
animated skeletons with normal heads in a finale that’s both sadistic, bizarre
and memorable… if not for the right reasons.
Well, it gave me a nightmare and I’m 47.
After the end of the Bullfighters 20th Century Fox’s B movie department was closed and everyone was made redundant. The Bullfighters became an unexpected hit and then the studio offered to reopen the department just for Laurel and Hardy only to discover that after you’ve made people redundant they seldom want to work for you again…
Fortunately this wasn’t their last film as they still made
Atoll K which is a mess too but has one of my favourite pieces of dialogue when
Stan and Ollie try to form the government of the sparsely populated island and
Oliver appoints himself as President and Stanley as “the People”….
…But I don’t have room or time to review that or Air Raid
Wardens or Nothing but Trouble (both of which I’ve skipped because they were
made by MGM) and Tree in a Test Tube is simple enough to google…
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