With 20-20 hindsight we can see that in Duck Soup Laurel and Hardy (and the staff of Hal Roach studios) have stumbled onto a discovery without realizing it. He sports a monocle and top hat, and exhibits a lot of the manners and mannerisms we associate with “Ollie.” If this sounds familiar, this film, based on a comedy sketch by Stan’s father Arthur Jefferson, was later remade by Laurel and Hardy as the talkie Another Fine Mess (1930). But Hardy is particularly close to what we know, perhaps because he is doing the kind of tramp who puts on airs. Laurel is playing dumb (which he doesn’t always do) in this one. They end up having to fight the fire, which they apparently started, anyway. The owner returns early and furiously throws them out. They take refuge in a mansion where the owner is away for the weekend and masquerade as the owner and the maid (Laurel in drag). In Duck Soup, Laurel and Hardy play a pair of tramps who are fleeing a conscription of hobos to fight a raging forest fire.
Why does it have the same title as the 1933 Marx Brothers movie? Perhaps the fact that the supervising director for the first one, and the director of the second one, were one and the same man: Leo McCarey. Apart from this, the films have almost nothing to do with one another. This is remarkable especially given that their roles are unlike what they have previously played and that they would revert to other characterizations immediately afterward. Yet they are amazingly like the characters for which they would eventually become famous. And it’s a good thing too, for the film has great historical importance, at least to film and comedy fans and scholars. It marks the first pairing of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as co-stars, although they were not yet officially billed as a team here. This film was long thought permanently lost until a copy surfaced in 1974. To read about that bit of foreshadowing, go here. This leaves out the earlier film The Lucky Dog, from five years earlier.
#VILLAINS IN LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES PROFESSIONAL#
We begin the survey in 1926 when the professional relationship began in earnest. Some of these movies are among the highest attainments of comedy film-making and comic performance. Some of Laurel and Hardy’s later silents, once they were teamed and really got cooking are not just some of the funniest Laurel and Hardy movies, nor some of the funniest silent comedies, but some of the funniest movies of all time. There are maybe a dozen of them I’d show a newbie as an introduction to silent film comedy, not simply to demonstrate that it’s okay, but to demonstrate its sustained superlativity. You’re making the worst mistake of your life if you think the silent work is somehow negligible and worth skipping because it lacks dialogue. We’d previously covered this ground with a bit more of analysis and pre-digestion in our earlier post on How Laurel and Hardy Became a Team, but this one breaks it down film by film.
_03.jpg "villains in laurel and hardy movies")
To mark the occasion, we contribute this post on the first leg of their career as a comedy team - the silent period. Stan and Ollie is due to have its world premiere tonight at the BFI Film Festival.
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