Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years │ Eureka Entertainment
Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
It’s funny, you think you’ve seen everything that the golden age of Hollywood has to offer, and then along comes a gift-packaged treasure trove of fresh material from over a hundred years ago. Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years is the culmination of painstaking research, detective work and artistry to bring us fifteen shorts from the Anglo-American comic duo made up of the Lancashire-born Stan Laurel and the Georgia-raised Oliver Hardy who, under the canny hand of the producer Hal Roach, became the most enduring comedy duo of all time. The least likely of partnerships, Laurel was the wimpish cry-baby who got into no end of scrapes alongside Hardy, the fastidious, overweight buffoon with the tight-fitting jackets, both of whom more often than not wore matching bowler hats. Having watched countless documentaries on the silent era, particularly the era of silent comedy, I have to admit that I am nowhere near as familiar with Laurel & Hardy as I am Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd. Here, then, is the resurrection of this odd couple from the 1921 two-reeler The Lucky Dog through to their most productive year in silents, 1927.
In The Lucky Dog, Stan Laurel plays a man unable to meet his rent, who is unceremoniously thrown out of his lodgings by an angry woman, along with the introductory intertitle: “So broke he couldn’t buy tin polish for a thumb tack” – which conjures up a certain vivid imagery. This is followed by a caption explaining that Stanley Laurel’s lessor is “the landlady whose heart is harder than her mattress.” And so Laurel finds himself swept into the street, along with his valise holding all his worldly belongings, where a bang to his head produces a ring of superimposed angels and, as he embraces one of them, finds he is actually being licked on the mouth by a stray dog. Then, as he’s wiping the canine saliva off his face, a streetcar screeches to a halt behind him, as he’s actually sprawled across a train track. He’s then accosted by the driver, who declares, “if you want to be a headlight, come round when you’re lit up.” Everybody is a joker in these films and I often found myself laughing harder at the wordplay of the intertitles than at the physical comedy. Then, after many more pratfalls and collisions with another tram and a car – Laurel is an extraordinary acrobat – the dog stows away in his battered valise and Laurel finally meets Hardy. On this occasion, Oliver Hardy plays an armed thief and when Laurel encounters his professional partner for the first time, he interrupts a hold-up when, with remarkable legerdemain, Hardy stuffs a wad of stolen cash into his back pocket, when it’s actually Laurel’s jacket pocket, who is bent over (behind him) trying to work out why his valise has developed a life of its own. Then Oliver Hardy spins round and sees he has another victim and barks, "Stick 'em both up, insect, before I comb your hair with lead." We’re now just five minutes into the first short out of fifteen where Laurel & Hardy work closer and closer together, before establishing their iconic personas in the masterpiece that is The Battle of the Century.
The dog in the first film seems to set a precedent of cats and dogs that appear – and cows – throughout the films, along with the omnipresence of a certain police presence (and their trusty truncheons). As the films are shot in Los Angeles, many of the streets and sets have a familiarity to them, culminating in The Battle of the Century which is an epic, twenty-minute parody of all the staples of silent comedy, from the recalcitrant banana skin to the most epic custard pie/cream pie fight in the history of the movies up until that time, only surpassed in Blake Edwards’ The Great Escape 38 years later. What we learn here is that the pies were the real thing – cream pies with real cream – a whole truckload of them – eventually attracting the attention of a swarm of bees which are just visible if you look closely, as all that real cream in the Californian sun would have become quite attractive to insects by the end of the day. All these wonderful insights are provided by the audio annotation on each film, in some cases with different commentaries to choose from, along with a splendid interview with the historian and composer Neil Brand, who also contributes some of the music. This is a package that just gives and gives – it is a two-disc set – including footage previously believed to have been lost, scrupulously restored and released on high-definition Blu-ray for the first time, along with recorded interviews with Laurel & Hardy themselves, some alternative scores for some of the shorts and more. You couldn’t possibly watch the whole thing in one sitting, so it’s a treat you can return to time and time again.
Eureka Entertainment’s release of Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years is now available on Blu-ray
EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT is the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK. In 2004, Eureka! established the award winning Masters of Cinema Series, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing. In 2014, Eureka! established Eureka! Classics intended to highlight a broader selection of classic and cult cinema, and in 2017, Eureka! established Montage Pictures, a label celebrating ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors.
