The Best of Laurel & Hardy (shorts)

 

This is the 250th post on this blog. It looked pretty unlikely for years that we would ever get this far. But now we have the familiar swing back for a while, and if you have followed my back catalogue, some old story formats will make a comeback in the near future. We'll see how long this will last, but let's just make the most of what we have now.

One of the first films "reviewed" here was a short film of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy called Laughing Gravy. It's certainly among their best, and features a truly nasty ending gag. Recently, I realized that this was just in the two-reel version of the short. There's also a three-reeled version that replaces the end gag with minutes of Laurel & Hardy arguing about their friendship. It's really limp compared to the tight gag-fest of the shorter version, and of course not nearly as funny gallows humour.

Since I've been watching a few Laurel & Hardy compilation dvd's while in quarantine, I thought it would be of good public interest to make a list out of my favorite shorts. After all, while they were prolific and usually maintained a good quality throughout their team-up with producer Hal Roach, there are some gems that warrant a more closer look.

Big Business (1929)
Directors: James W. Horne, Leo McCarey

This silent-era flick has basically everything you would want from a L&H short. It has an interesting premise, snowballing situations and lots of property damage. Moreover, the film pits the duo against the hot-tempered moustache-man James Finlayson, who had a supporting role in many of the Roach-era films. He had a very silly bug-eyed rage face, which made him an excellent foil to Laurel & Hardy's tomfoolery.

In this story, sales tactics for a christmas tree fail to impress Finlayson, but L&H keep pushing it, making the angered customer destroy one of the trees. This causess L&H to retort and begin to do damage on the occupant's house, which in turn makes Finlayson attack Laurel & Hardy's car. At the point where the car is exploded and half the neighborhood is out to see the epic battle, a policeman arrives. 

A lot of laughs are mined out of the characters trying to appear innocent as they have just busted a window wide open and destroyed just about everything inside. The cop is portrayed here as a mere observer, not even attempting to stop the wonton destruction but just biding their time to get to punish the people responsible.

Liberty (1929)
Dir. Leo McCarey

Probably taking a page from the book of Harold Lloyd, this silent one sees the pair escape the police in a skyscraper construction site. But what really drives the plot is the fact that the pair has dressed each other's pants on and they try to switch them back.

The gag-work is beautifully laid-out, with Ollie getting a live lobster in his pants near the beginning, that snips his bottom at key turns, making him almost drop again and again. The film works as a time-piece of a time where cities were building up almost overnight, and the unexpected adventures they could provide for the hapless wanderer. The cop chasing them with quite lethal means also gets his comeuppance in the end with a supermarioesque squashing.

Brats (1930)
Dir. James Parrott

There are several films like Twice Two (1933) that see the actors do a dual role as their usual characters, and in that case both of their wives. But I find it funnier when grown men play children than women. It also requires a bit of trick photography as Stan & Ollie's kids in this one are a lot smaller than their grown-up counterparts.

Juniors won't go peacefully to bed, running amuck and pulling pranks well after their bedtime. Meanwhile, their dads attempt to play billiards and of course wreck their own story as well. Upstairs, Ollie Jr. gets shot in the butt and Stan Jr. makes the batroom overflow. The end gag could have been an even bigger one, with some consequences shown, but it is splendidly set up with Ollie's usual dismissiveness of Stan and cocky demeneour.

The Music Box (1932)
Director: James Parrott

One of their best-known films, this one sees Stan & Ollie as movers, set to deliver a piano into a fancy hilltop mansion. Of course even the staircase to the house proves to be a big obstacle, never mind getting the box containing the instrument inside the house. It is a good example of the farcical nature of snowballing destruction, as well as utilizing all manners of sight gags as well as the knowledge of the myth of Sisyphos.  

The film's lofty reputation would let one to expect an even more outrageous finale as the owner of the house arrives to find a piano he didn't want as well as most of his property demolished. While this is one of the smoother-running shorts with good gags throughout, I also have a soft spot of shorts that have an even more outrageous ending. For instance, the silent short Wrong Again (1929) has a landowner fed up with shenanigans take out his shotgun and say to his mother to read about the murder (of Stan & Ollie) in tomorrow's newspaper. 

Busy Bodies (1933)
Director: Lloyd French

This one sees Stan & Ollie in a new job at a woodshop. They soon annoy their co-workers and bumble about cluelessly as to make the whole plant turn against them.

It is a great piece of prop comedy that uses all sorts of power tools and building materials to make Ollie's day worse and worse. It even has a more painful version of Chaplin's Modern Times gag where Ollie is sucked into the gears of a major machine and spat out. And as I love the destruction of cars in particular, the final gag sees their car being sawed in half by a giant buzz-saw. It has been said that the filming of this stunt was dangerous as all hell and could have easily killed our beloved duo.

Dirty Work (1933)
Dir. Lloyd French

Now, having Laurel and Hardy act as chimney-sweeps that manage to soot up the house and demolish the chimney is by itself funny, but not that remarkable. What makes this short so notable is that the house they're called to is also the house where a mad professor is acting out some strange experiments on a formula that rejuvenates ducks back into eggs.

These two sides of the movie have very little to do with one another, mainly a disgusted butler going in an out of the two ordeals going on at the time. Intercut together they create quite a lot of intrigue and even suspense. It's obvious Stan & Ollie will mess up the place and get turned into test subjects, and the waiting is a part of the fun, as well as all shotgun-related shenanigans. It does pay off in the end. It was rare for the Laurel & Hardy films to turn to straight-out science fiction, but in this case it makes for a memorable experience. Beyond that, "I have nothing to say!"

Thicker Than Water (1935)
Dir. James W. Horne

As moviegoing changed, there was no more need for short films and Laurel & Hardy moved on to feature-length films. But they gave their one last shot in this one, that is probably the best one that deals with martital troubles and the friendship between the two characters. I often find the nagging wife -films to be a bit too much like boomer humor for my tastes, even if (or especially when) they get cartoonishly violent. But they also tend to give the impression that Ollie prefers Stan over his wife, which causes jealousy. Read what you will out of that.

Nevertheless, this film is conceptually quite inventive. Characters break the 4th wall literally, since the only way they can move from one location to another is to physically drag out the next scene over the screen. The film also has a quite unpredictable plot; from marital woes and money troubles we move on to an auction of a grandfather clock, and there to some hospital humor as Ollie needs a blood transfusion.

This is a bit of a SPOILER, but the last scene is something special as the transfusion switches the pairs personalities, and we see the respective actors try each others maneurs on for size. Truly this was well ahead of its time, long before anyone had the idea of Face/Off in mind.

Do you have a favorite Laurel & Hardy joint? I would like to hear from them, so I might maybe make a sequel to this post some day.

A Tribute to the Classic Universal Monsters

A recent (like, a year ago, tops) discussion with some fellow film fans revealed that not everyone thinks that the classic monster films of Universal in the 1930's and 40's are as cracking as I do. Sure, those films are iconic in their imagery and widely recognized as essential building blocks of horror as a genre. But their sometimes slow-moving pace and theatrical acting don't appeal to everybody.

Since we celebrate the studio's 100th anniversary this year and Halloween's a-coming, I'll take a chance to say a few words about why I dig these movies. True, it's mostly due to several brilliant directors such as James Whale and Tod Browning, but there's just something about Universal's horror movies in general which appeals to me.

Bela Lugosi's Dracula is a perfect mix of fascinating sexuality and the underlying threat of that.

True, the films are somewhat old-fashioned. But in that lies also their greatest strength. For the basic thing about Universal's monsters are that they are films about being different and out-of-place. It is easier to sympathize with the monsters, often expressing some pretty human desires and goals, than with their narrow-minded, old-fashioned conservative mindsets. When the crime of being true to oneself and just wanting some love gets the monster destroyed in the end, it's not too far-fetched to see some of these stories as much like Greek tragedies.

A gifted hero grows too ambitious, goes mad and to his downfall, like Claude Rains's Invisible Man.

Of course this was also at the point where movies serialized and every subsequent effort either undid the emotional punch of the first ones, or went to really weird and unexpected places, such as the Frankenstein sequels. But I'd rather take brain-switching antics and Ygor over House of Frankenstein-style ill-advised anthologies.

As mentioned, the sexuality of the monsters is also a strong underlying theme. One of the reasons so many sequels were so boring was that censorship, too much political correctness and understanding made them wishy-washy. The real classics pushed the limit as much as was available to hint during those chastise days. The Bride of Frankenstein even has a fair amount of hinting at the society's handling of homosexuals, which is a radical idea for the time. And it did it with much more grace than any X-Men movie, trying out similar metaphors.

Dr. Pretorius is as camp as they come.

As a child, of course the major draw to these movies was the iconic look of these monsters, replicated, redone and slapped into memorabilia since time immortal. It's hard to imagine Frankenstein's monster that doesn't look like Karloff nowadays (Everyone picks him over Robert DeNiro for a good reason). This look was created by a string of very talented artists (in the case of Frankenstein, make up artist and stunt man Jack Pierce. How's that combo for a balance of the masculine and the feminine?). As a contrast, nobody remembers what the zombies looked on the contemporary, also smart horror film I Walked With A Zombie, for instance.

This bolt-neck however is one of the most iconic characters in the world. Up there with Mickey Mouse and Angry Birds.

If I went into the films to see iconic characters, I stayed for the gothic athmosphere. Lonely castles on hilltops, misty moors, gypsy caravans, mad doctor's lairs. These things basically created your basic horror imagery from scratch, and even though they are clearly studio sets, this creates a sense that something is afoul and a bit wrong in the worlds of these films. a it should. Sadly, the budget for the sets and props also diminished with time and a lot of stuff was recycled from one movie to another. As you may guess, the films that created new things were the ones that stuck to my mind.

Universal's films are frank and theatrical, focusing on the main attraction and building everything around it. Plot-wise, the films adapted some very famous horror novels but cut a lot of corners in their storytelling. While it's sad that a proper adaptation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein still lets fans await for itself, Universal's loose version is a true corker, and a true classic to boot. At it's core the Universal movies are easy morality stories, with a good, a bad and an ugly character duking it out. Often there are curses, magic or other supernatural forces that prevent or limit the lives of the characters.

Karloff's Mummy only appears like this for one scene. But the horrible magic that brought him back to life is apparent in every scene.

But the ideas are certainly not hard to gasp by even the youngest viewers. Since the scariness of the stories has long since vanished, they even work as a sort of gateway drug to horror enthusiasm, as dozens of gifted filmmakers born since the 1930's can testify. Come for the cuddly creatures, stay for the gothic worlds.

While the main plot was simple, the subtext was heavy and the visions strong. The high-quality workers on the job of these movies gave life to films by even lower-quality directors, such as the original Wolf Man or The Mummy. Sets, lights, make up, costumes, the right mood and character actors salvage a lot. For major studio films, Universal's horror pictures still feel artistic in their dream-like visions told.

Karloff's Frankenstein with some much appreciated me-time.

In the end, Universal cranked out the films maybe a tad too many (one idea can only last so long) and usually the more sequels got made, the worse they got. But the studio did show to be creative with their large back catalogue of iconic characters until at least the turn of the millennium. Say what you will about Hollow Man, but having Paul Verhoeven remake The Invisible Man as an erotic thriller was a ballsy move from the studio. It's sad to see they've lost their touch, churning dreck like Van Helsing and the new Wolf Man nowadays. But still, the old monster movies of Universal should be watched and appreciated by film fans still today.