THE LAUREL AND HARDY SOUND SHORTS - Ranking 40-36.

I'm back after a very long layoff for reasons to numbingly dull to explain. I have to confess, I have been a massive Laurel and Hardy fan since early childhood, a member of the team's official fan club (or appreciation society if you prefer) for over four decades, and even a world champion regarding general knowledge quizzes on the pair. So it is only natural that I cast a critical eye on their films, starting with their celebrated series of sound shorts, made exclusively at the Hal Roach Studios from 1929 to 1935. This personal list is merely my own personal opinion, knowing all the titles involved from backwards to forwards, side to side, chanting the dialogue in my own head, knowing what will come next yet still laughing and enjoying the company of two placidly dumb, naive but thoroughly nice and likeable people, with merits even in their weakest and lesser subjects, the latter of which we start off with. The list does not include their guest or cameo appearances in a number of other Roach short films that featured Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts ('On The Loose'), Our Gang ('Wild Poses'), Charley Chase ('On The Wrong Trek'), and their appearance in the all-star charity film 'The Stolen Jools' (aka 'The Slippery Pearls').

40.BE BIG! (1931)  

      

It is an undoubted fact that the series of sound short films Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are the best known, most revived, celebrated and loved in cinema history, above those of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, The Three Stooges, Edgar Kennedy and scores of other contemporaries, now mostly long forgotten. The amount of interest over 8 decades after their last starring short film was made is still extraordinary even in this more dehumanised and cynical age of laptops, computers, smartphones and tablets, a wildly exaggerated dystopian space age in the 1930's, when sound films were the new technological wonder of the time. It's also arguable that unlike their contemporaries, Laurel and Hardy never truly made a bad or unwatchable short film in the sound era, though they could fall behind their usual high, or on occasions, peerless standards.

Stan and Ollie (the latter known as "Babe" off screen to friends and colleagues) were the masters not just of the short comedy format, but of the short film itself, and no performer or filmmaker has ever matched their consistently high standards in this particular medium. But a handful did fall below what was expected from them, and Be Big! is generally recognised by critics, historians and buffs as myself as the weakest example of the 40 sound shorts they made with Roach.

Be Big! isn't especially terrible in itself, as the first reel is actually consistently amusing, reworked as it is from one of their latter silents We Faw Down, which eventually begat their celebrated feature film Sons of The Desert, of which will be discussed at a later date when we come to the Roach features.

There are some funny visual and verbal gags in the opening ten minutes or so as Ollie feigns illness so he and Stan can attend a party being thrown at a Masonic Lodge-style organisation in the former's honour instead of going with their wives on a trip to Atlantic City. So far, so good. But as soon as the wives fall for Ollie's fainting spell and leave without them, Be Big! 's remaining two reels are taken up with the boys putting on each other's riding boots which is the Lodge's official costume for such events. L & H were comic masters at milking gags out of single situations, but the particular task of Ollie trying to get out of Stan's boots is far too thin a premise which may have worked for about five minutes, not over fifteen. There certainly are some funny moments scattered within, but frustration and tedium set in fairly quickly for both L & H and the audience, with the normally charming and endearing background music, predominantly by LeRoy Shield, coming across as over-emphatic and over-blown on this occasion on a soundtrack that has not survived well, even in modern cleaned-up versions. For many years a one reel version was available on the old home movie market, and the BBC also showed an abridged and edited print which even though it removed the more laboured and prolonged footage was still too much of an extended joke. 

So Be Big! is the closest the team came to making an absolute clunker in their series of short films, poor by their own standards, yet compared to most of their rivals at the time, and certainly what passes for comedy nowadays, not as bad as you would think as there are still some great gags present, but not enough to save it being probably their weakest sound short.

39.BERTH MARKS (1929)

The team's second so-called 'talkie' following Unaccustomed As We Are, Berth Marks benefits from some decent location filming but is hampered, as most of their earliest sound shorts are, by the technical limitations that were a problem in these embryonic days. A silent version was available to cinemas not yet equipped for sound, and the non-talking version was probably better paced and less creaky than the talking version, which was not readily available even on the home movie market for many years until it eventually turned up on the BBC, for example as late as the 1990's, then on VHS and DVD in restored prints. 

Berth Marks has a similarly overlong and rather irksome scene as Be Big! when the boys attempt to change into their bedclothes in a cramped upper berth while travelling as musicians by train to Pottsville in vaudeville. Restrictions on sound editing and re-recording in these early days of talking pictures placed further strains on timing and filming. The scene actually worked rather better in one of their 20th Century Fox features, the somewhat unfairly maligned The Big Noise, which benefited from the advances in sound and film technology a decade and a half on. 

But Laurel and Hardy were basically in the same boat as everybody else in these early days of sound, and had to find ways round these dilemmas which they did remarkably quickly, less than a year later in fact. William Everson called the film "one of the few really poor comedies the team made...a misfire all down the line", though acknowledged the various difficulties encountered by major and minor film studios in this period. That said, there are still one or two decent laughs abound, with an amusing dialogue sequence with Pat Harmon (as illustrated above), and a clothes ripping scene involving other train passengers, while an obviously inferior imitation of the ferociously paced street battles and "reciprocal destruction" sequences of their silent days, actually works quite well, but it would take until the following year when the team would successfully negotiate the early problems that bedevilled early sound film-making.

38.UNACCUSTOMED AS WE ARE (1929)

The team's first talking film is a wholly set-bound domestic comedy, awkwardly paced and statically filmed, yet it is obvious that the voices of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are perfectly suited to their characters developed in the silent era in the previous two years. Not many people can recall the voices of Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd when they eventually spoke for the first time on film, in Chaplin's case as late as 1940 in The Great Dictator (although he sung a nonsense lyric song in Modern Times four years earlier). But even at this early stage, the voices of Laurel and Hardy are distinctive, characterful and memorable, which would be expanded on and deepened in the years ahead. Stan's slightly lisping Lancashire-cum-American accent, which would be gently modified as time went on, and Ollie's Southern American drawl, capable of great warmth and charm with occasional forays into harshness, was allied with his comic partner in perfect harmony.

This is the most notable aspect of Unaccustomed As We Are, more notable than the film itself which survives nine decades on in a rather worn, crackly soundtrack, although we can be grateful there is speech to listen to anyway as the sound-on-disc recording was lost for many years until it was found again in the late 70's.

There is a great deal of dialogue in the film, and a great deal which is difficult to decipher, as there is a large emphasis on verbal rather than visual humour, the latter of which struggles to come off due to the technical restrictions of the time, with Ollie being blown out of a kitchen represented by falling back rather clumsily, accompanied by a rather tame-looking flame thrower, not a patch on the spectacular reworking of the scene (and indeed much of the film) in the much later feature Block-Heads. The supporting cast of Edgar Kennedy, Mae Busch and Thelma Todd provide good value, and despite its undoubted creakiness still provides some decent laughs, though most modern audiences will find the film a bit of a strain to watch today as the obviously primitive sound recording had some time to go before technical advances would take place, though only for about another year.

After various plot complications and misunderstandings, Kennedy the cop gets a battering from his wife, with Stan addressing Ollie as "Mr.Hardy" at this stage, taking a massive noisy tumble down the stairs which uses the possibilities of sound in an imaginative, amusing manner.

So L & H's introduction the world of sound pictures is uncertain, stagey and nervy, but their voices register very well, and better things would lie ahead.

 37.OLIVER THE EIGHTH (1934)

Laurel and Hardy's occasional forays into horror or panic comedy did not always suit their style of comedy best, as they were essentially about subtle facial pantomime and reaction to situations, not running around screaming in terror or being threatened with unpleasant demises.

Oliver The Eighth was their final three-reeler and made in a period when Hal Roach was gradually winding down their short film series in favour of features, which Stan Laurel never particularly approved of as he felt much more at home in the short film format, creating gags and situations rather than sustaining a story in a feature-length narrative.

It was always difficult for pure comedians like Laurel and Hardy to transfer to the feature film format as they did not have dramatic aspersions like Chaplin, whose features were basically dramas with humorous passages. Laurel and Hardy just wanted to make people laugh, and they did it better than virtually any other artist in film history, including Chaplin himself, who overall was a better dramatist and feature film maker than Stan Laurel, but inferior as a creator of gags and comic situations.

Far inferior in fact, but Oliver The Eighth gives the impression of an era coming to an end, as it would do barely a year after. Slow of pace and containing moderately funny but not outstanding material, there is a slightly upsetting tone to the film as Ollie nearly succumbs to a nasty death, revived by a rather hackneyed 'dream' ending, with Mae Busch giving a rather sinister performance that exudes very little humour, which leaves an overall feeling of ambivalence and uncertainty in the viewer as the film ends.

36.THE LAUREL-HARDY MURDER CASE (1930)

A film with a rather curious reputation; a quintessential and eponymously named reference book from the mid-70's gave this their highest rating of four (hats), while The Music Box oddly received half (a hat) less. Others though have called it their worst short film, "dull", "unamusing", affected by  "lethargy" and with the exception of a briefly seen Tiny Sandford, containing an unfamiliar supporting cast with such foils as James Finlayson and Charlie Hall conspicuously absent, yet important as the very first occasion Ollie turns to Stan and exclaims: "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into!" (and not "fine mess" as is too often misquoted).

I used to really like this film as a young child, but not as much now in rather cynical middle age, as there is a great amount of screaming and howling in the film, some from the atypical supporting cast but mostly from the boys themselves. The jokes involving panic and misunderstandings in the creepiest of old dark houses were fairly obvious even for 1930, yet some of them (a bat under a bedsheet, a lampshade covered in another bedsheet accidentally following Stan and Ollie down a massive stair case) are executed very well and do provide some genuine laughs.

On the other hand, William Everson complained of a large mortality rate, and some of these scenes may prove a bit shocking for young children watching (though I wasn't too bothered at such an age), particularly when various relatives of Stan are done away with by a phone-operated trapdoor (this scene appears to have been reworked into a Morecambe and Wise film, That Riviera Touch, in 1966).

Randy Skretvedt has recently said the film is somewhat better than its reputation suggests, as restored HD prints show some effective production values, and the cliched old dark house during a thunderstorm does look moodily atmospheric, but whether or not this is suitable for a L & H film is a matter of conjecture. The best scenes are near the beginning where the boys laze away the day at a seedy dockside location;some of what follows has some very funny moments, but the film as a whole is morbid and a change of tack that doesn't entirely suit them, with a predictable dream ending as was the case with Oliver The Eighth. The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case is slightly better, but it just shows that the horror comedy sub-genre was not quite Laurel and Hardy's forte (it rather suited the wisecracking style of Bob Hope more a decade later in The Cat and The Canary and The Ghost Breakers).