Laurel & Hardy; The Essential Collection

          The first real blog of any substance I posted here was in May of last year. After praising all the great pop culture stuff that was scheduled to come out, I closed with the comment, “Now all we need is for someone to release a complete Laurel & Hardy box set and all the 30 minute episodes of SCTV, and we’ll pretty much have heaven here on earth pop culture wise.” Surprisingly, considering I was referring to films that are around 70 years old, I got one of my wishes granted rather quickly. In late October 2011 RHI Entertainment issued a great 10 DVD boxed set containing all the sound movies L&H made for Hal Roach Studios! That’s a whopping 32 hours and 21 minutes of uncannily warm-hearted slapstick catastrophes. Of course, I can’t recommend them highly enough.       

          I am going to quibble over one thing, though. The documentary with Dick Van Dyke, Jerry Lewis, Tim Conway & Penn & Teller is a nice testimony to L&H’s greatness, but it is not very informative and not very accurate. It is fun to hear Van Dyke & Lewis, who knew Stan personally, explain what a nice man he was. One anecdote related by Lewis bothered me, though.

           Yes, I am a total pedantic twerp, and I am going to suggest that I know better information about something than the guy who was actually there in the 1920’s is providing. Please humor me for a few paragraphs.

            Lewis states the way the Laurel and Hardy partnership was formed. Per Stan Laurel, Laurel saw the heavy, six foot two, baby-faced Oliver Hardy carrying a pipe across the Hal Roach Studio lot. It struck Laurel that this construction worker would be a perfect physical contrast to him, and for whom he would make a perfect comic foil. Stan allegedly asked Hardy if he would like to act with him in movies. Hardy set the pipe down and said something to the effect of, “It’s gotta be better than what I’m doing.” As the story goes, Hardy told Laurel he didn’t know the first thing about acting, but Stan told him, basically, “Just follow me, and you’ll be fine.” Of course, this gives Stan credit for discovering Ollie, and for teaching him everything he knew. This story does not appear in Randy Skretvedt’s exhaustive (also highly recommended) book “Laurel & Hardy; The Magic Behind the Movies”. Comedy people from the early days of show business are known for never letting the truth get in the way of a good story. (George Burns, Mack Sennett, Hal Roach, The Marx Brothers, and most notoriously W.C Fields are all examples of people who could propagate a wild, utterly false show biz story for its own sake.)

          The implication is that Ollie had no show biz experience or inclinations prior to appearing with Stan. Let’s face it, even a comic genius like Stan Laurel couldn’t have made Hardy THAT GREAT, THAT FAST. In reality, Oliver Hardy was a show business professional at the age of eight, singing in a group called Coburn’s Minstrels. He was gifted with a beautiful singing voice, as heard in a few (not nearly enough!) of the L&H films. His mother sent him to Atlanta, in their home state of Georgia to take voice lessens. He quickly started dodging class in favor of singing before slide show presentations at a local theater for 50cents a day. At 18 he began managing a movie theater and was appalled at how badly the silent movie actors acted. Convinced he couldn’t do worse, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 1913 to become an actor in the burgeoning film community there. Between 1914 and 1917 he acted in over 100 comedy shorts for the Lubin and Vim companies. His success was such that when he signed to Hal Roach Studios as a contract player, it warranted a press release that appeared in newspapers February 6, 1926, and is reproduced from a newspaper clipping in Skretvedt’s book. A similar clipping for Stan’s Roach signing of March 2, 1923 also appears. “Duck Soup” Laurel and Hardy’s first appearance together in a film did not occur until early 1927. They appeared together as a team in that film, then followed it with five more films in which they both appear, but rarely appear in any scenes together. When they do appear together in these films, it is as wise guy enemies, not as the sweet, dim-witted best friend characters we love them as. FINALLY, in the summer of 1927, in “Do Detectives Think?”, they become the “Laurel and Hardy characters” that would persevere through the ages.

            Okay, so 20,000 people will buy the DVDs and hear the untrue version, and three people who don’t care will learn the truth on my weblog. As Vivian Stanshall would say, “Life’s like that.”

            Anyway, BUY THESE DVDs! I believe these movies are as funny today as the day they were released. Funny is for eternity, and happily, Hardy was always wrong when he said, “This is no time for levity!”