THE LAUREL & HARDY FUN HOUSE (#8)

Warner Home Video in Germany (Region 2) has released a series of Laurel & Hardy’s MGM-released features under the blanket title of “Hal Roach Presents” (even those 1940s misfires that Mr. Roach had nothing to do with). All of them are already available in the U.S. with the exception of the wild 1934 comedy Hollywood Party, so we imported it (14.95 euros).

Jimmy Durante’s jungle-movie career as Schnarzan, Lord of the Jungle is on the wane because of his exceedingly moth-eaten lion foes. (Producer: “They have MANGE!” Durante: “Well, they didn’t get it from ME!”) The Schnozz hosts a party full of bigwigs to impress Baron Munchausen (Jack Pearl), famed lion tamer. There, I’ve given you the entire plot in a few lines, and believe you me folks, I had to pad this paragraph shamelessly to give it an acceptable length.

Lupe Velez is Jimmy’s rejected Jungle Jane, Charles Butterworth and Polly Moran are pretty funny as a clueless pair of Oklahoma oil barons, Eddie Quillan and June Clyde are the star-crossed young lovers, and the mouse behind the couch is Mickey himself, voiced by Walt Disney (including a Durante imitation). Mickey introduces a lovely Technicolor cartoon called “The Choc-Late Soldiers” that I’ve never seen on any Disney compilation disc. Ted Healy and his Stooges (Misters Howard, Fine, and Howard) are a gang of slap-happy autograph seekers, and Curly is accused of being, not for the last time in his career, a modern-day Neanderthal. A group of neon-lit telephone operators in skimpy art deco dresses sing “Hollywood Party”, a fun song that’s been covered by the wonderful Janet Klein. George Givot is Liondora, Schnarzan’s movie rival, who pretends to be a Greek Grand Duke to crash the party, and he romances Miss Moran with lines like “The moon is so marshmallow in the figments of your head,” and I always use that line on dates and never remembered where I’d heard it.

Okay, so you’re wading through this review (assuming you’re still here) to get to the Laurel & Hardy part, which is why we all wade through this movie in the first place. Stan and Ollie show up in the last ten minutes (of a 63 min. film) as the guys who had caught Munchausen’s lions and got swindled out of them. Ten seconds after they’d appeared at the door I’d laughed harder than I had in the first 53 min. of the film; this is one of their most celebrated appearances, as they are soon breaking eggs in the shoe of Miss Valez, a highpoint in 1930s screen comedy (Warners included this sequence as a bonus in their Laurel & Hardy U.S. DVD collection).

The German DVD looks and sounds very good; there’s no bonus material, but you’ve got a choice between English and (dubbed) German and you can watch it with German subtitles if you want.

Nobody’s going to say this is a great film, but hey, it’s barely an hour long and I’d sit through 53 minutes of anything to see 10 great minutes of Laurel & Hardy. Besides, the film’s goofiness (it seems to have been written on the fly) is kind of catchy; during a sequence in which Durante discusses his past reincarnated lives, we’re treated to the sight of Paul Revere riding a horse with a huge schnozz. Now THAT is entertainment.

(#7)

Now THIS is more like it, fans.

After years of fans being subjected to numerous lackluster Laurel & Hardy (mostly, Laurel OR Hardy silent films) releases on DVD in the U.S., including last week’s Fox trio of 1940s horrors, the REAL Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy come to DVD with the first worthy collection of Hal Roach-produced L&H films to debut on DVD since the “Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy” series concluded SEVEN YEARS AGO. It’s about time!

TCM Archives: Laurel & Hardy Collection (Warners, SRP $39.98) includes impeccably restored editions of The Devil’s Brother (a/k/a Fra Diavolo, 1933) and Bonnie Scotland (1935), plus various segments with the Boys from the “all star” films The Hollywood Revue of 1929, Hollywood Party (1934), and Pick a Star (1937), plus the only remaining footage (and it’s not much) from the lost 1930 Technicolor feature The Rogue’s Song, plus a 90-min. documentary on short subjects that originally aired on TCM a couple of years ago. If you hear anybody denigrating this collection, you have my permission to break an egg in their shoe, cut off a lock of their hair and stick it to their chin with molasses, or toss a Christmas tree through their window.

The Devil’s Brother (directed by Hal Roach and Charley Rogers, with Rogers handling the L&H scenes, mainly) is an adaptation of Fra Diavalo, an early 19th century comic opera that would be totally forgotten if not for this film. Dennis King is a bandit called Fra Diavolo, who spends part of his time in the guise of the handsome Marquis de San Marco, part as a bandit who lives in the woods with his Merry Men robbing the gentry in the Italian countryside, and part wandering around idly singing cheery songs as loudly as he can. “Great Lords lost their gold to him – Great Ladies their hearts,” we’re told. Currently, he’s got his eyes on the lovely Lady Rocburg (Thelma Todd); Lord Rocburg is played by James Finlayson, so we all understand why she is so besotted with the Bandit King. Stanlio and Ollio are a couple of vagrants who decide to become bandits themselves, but when their first victim is Diavolo himself (ooops), they’re pressed into indentured servitude to help him handle Lady Thelma. From there, the comedy scenes (marvelous) alternate with the plot scenes (good, especially when Miss Todd – who never looked lovelier than she does here; clearly she was born in the wrong era and country – is in view). The music’s okay, but I turned on the subtitles to figure out what the lyrics were, despite the fact that I have the soundtrack! Incidentally, as if this isn’t enough, there’s another plot with a young captain of the guard who can’t marry his sweetheart until he captures Fra Diavolo, but that’s what that little “FF” button with the arrow on it on your remote control is for.

Highlights of the film: Stan showing Ollie how to play such games as “Finger-Wiggle” and “Kneesie-Earsie-Nosie”, Stan getting pickled in the wine cellar, and Stan explaining to Ollie why they should become bandits themselves (the second time he tries to explain it, they’re rich men who are robbing the poor and giving it to the bandits – you know Stan).

Laurel & Hardy made a lot of outstanding short subjects, and some good features but not a lot of outstanding ones. I number The Devil’s Brother as one of the latter.

The film was a huge success, and led to further operettas, including The Bohemian Girl and Babes in Toyland, but in 1935 the Boys were visiting Bonnie Scotland. Stan McLaurel has been bequeathed an inheritance, which turns out to be a set of bagpipes and a snuffbox. Trapped in their rental apartment with no money to pay the bill, they attempt to grill a fish dinner on their bedsprings, but end up in the Army instead. You know them. Shipped to India, they suddenly turn into a parody of Lives of a Bengal Lancer! It all works out in the end, thanks to a swarm of angry bees.

This film (directed by our old pal James W. Horne) isn’t as good as The Devil’s Brother, but the laughs that it does have are actually bigger, and certainly both films are far greater than anything in that Fox set, which contains no “Laurel & Hardy moments” at all. What are L&H moments? Those tiny bits of business that nobody else can get away with, but that are hysterical when our Boys do them. Example: Ollie does something stupid that backfires. “What are you doing?” Stan asks. “Mind your own business!” Ollie barks, then looks at us, exasperated. Another wonderful line I loved: after discovering that they have no inheritance and no way to get back to America, they decry ever leaving their home in the first place. “There we were, comfortably settled in jail.”

The additional segments (all of which are on disc two) are highlighted by a wonderful “tit for tat” sequence with Lupe Velez from Hollywood Party, and a screwy magic act from Hollywood Revue of 1929, with Jack Benny. The full-length documentary on short subjects is good, too, although note that it’s missing two sequences from the TV broadcast, one on Al Jolson and one on serials (with clips from Republic’s Captain America). My only complaint: the commentary on the two films, by Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann (co-authors of a terrific book on Our Gang), is disappointing. They don't have a whole lot to say, for some reason.

Forget the commentary complaint, though. This is the funniest DVD release of the year, folks, and a joy to add to my collection. A “must buy”.

LAUREL & HARDY FUN HOUSE #6

Previous visits to the Laurel & Hardy Fun House (available HERE) explained that most of the best-known, best loved films in their canon, the classic 1930s shorts and features produced at the Hal Roach Studio, are available in beautifully restored, remastered editions – if you happen to live in England, Belgium, or Germany or have an all-region DVD player (which you should). In the U.S., most of the Boys’ fans have to content themselves with the few public domain titles from that period, the cavalierly-produced DVDs with a few key titles from Artisan, or 20-year-old VHS tapes. Fox and Warner Bros., to their credit sensing the void in our lives, are both issuing boxed sets this month of L&H films, with decidedly mixed results (and wildly varying entertainment value). This week, we’ll look at the Fox offering; next week, we’ll cover the Warners set.
 
In 1940, after a long and fruitful partnership that had lasted more than a dozen years, Laurel & Hardy left Hal Roach for good and formed Laurel & Hardy Feature Productions. When Universal’s wartime comedy Buck Privates, starring Bud Abbott & Lou Costello, began packing them in at theatres across the nation in February of 1941, the Fox honchos called L&H and made them an offer to do their own service comedy, with an option for other films. Promised bigger budgets and better production values than they’d ever had with Roach, the Boys had every reason to think their best work was ahead of them. Instead, under producer Sol Wurtzel they found themselves given indifferent directors, bad writers, stinko scripts, situations that didn’t fit their characters, and supposedly a lack of input into the creation of comedy gags. Some of this could’ve been corrected by surer comedy hands behind the camera, but one thing could not: Stan and Ollie were getting old, which – with their childlike personas – was fatal to their comedy stylings.
 
Filmed in the summer of 1941 and released in October of that year, Great Guns turned out to be typical of all the films to follow: Laurel & Hardy playing a pair of really stupid guys mixed up with much smarter guys who treat them like morons. From time to time, a bit of the old L&H peeks through (courtesy of Stan’s comic genius, one guesses), but such scenes are brief and make the rest of the picture only the sadder. The plot is… well, part of the problem. A great Laurel & Hardy film can be described in a few words (“Carrying a piano up an impossibly high flight of steps”; “sneaking away from their wives to attend a lodge meeting”), but the Fox films require a full paragraph with footnotes and addenda. In this one, Stan & Ollie are servants to a sickly rich guy who gets drafted; they enlist with him to keep an eye on him. The sickly guy turns out to not be sickly at all, and when he and the babe behind the PX counter start making eyes at each other, the babe’s jealous other suitor, who happens to be the Boys’ gruff drill sergeant, steps in. Copying the climax to Buck Privates only with even less laughs, Stan & Ollie become heroes during the final war games and end up saving the day.

This review would be way too long (I know, I know, it is already) if I mentioned everything that’s wrong with the film, but I’ll give you an example: Ollie tells a tough guy who’s stolen his breakfast, “I need to eat. An army travels on its stomach, you know!” To which the guy retorts, “You could travel to China.” What I liked about it: (1) Stan’s battle with a light bulb that only lights when it’s not in the socket; and (2) Stan reprising an old bit in which he’s on both ends of a long board that he’s carrying.
 
The Buck Privates crowd, old Laurel & Hardy fans, and the Fox publicity machine made Great Guns a big hit (the fact that Fox owned 500 theatres didn’t hurt), and additional films followed, most of which make Great Guns look like a comic masterpiece. (According to John McElwee of greenbriarpictureshows.blogspot.com, the film netted a nice profit of more than $500,000.)
 
After making A-Haunting We Will Go for Fox and Air Raid Wardens for MGM, the Boys were back at Fox for Jitterbugs. This film was better, aided by the presence of director Malcolm St. Clair, who had worked with Mack Sennett and Buster Keaton. Most importantly, Laurel and Hardy play characters who actually come close to the classic Stan & Ollie that we know and love. Unfortunately, the convoluted plot (something about good con artists trying to con evil con artists, with Laurel & Hardy as zoot-suited musicians who end up hawking phony pills that are supposed to turn water into gasoline) and the fact that the Boys aren’t actually given anything funny to do have to be held against it. The whole exercise appears to be fashioned as a vehicle to introduce new Fox discovery Vivian Blaine.
 
Hardy named this as one of his favorite films, no doubt because he gets a lot of screen time as a bogus Texas millionaire, but there’s a long scene with him wooing a woman while Stan hides under the bed, and to this minute I can’t figure out why the entire sequence exists: it’s lengthy, makes no sense in terms of the story, and isn’t funny. Furthermore, like most of the post-1940 films, Hardy is simply mean to Laurel, mimicking the Abbott and Costello relationship. In the old days, the Boys had a true affection for each other until Stan would do something so dumb that Ollie would get exasperated. Now, Hardy wakes up exasperated.
 
Following The Dancing Masters, the Boys were back with director St. Clair for their most loathed feature, The Big Noise. In a plot right out of a Three Stooges short (but with fewer laughs), Stan & Ollie are a pair of janitors who impersonate detectives. They’re sent to guard a top-secret new type of bomb at an eccentric inventor’s creepy mansion. Bobby Blake (yes, THAT Bobby Blake) is around as an obnoxious troublemaker. Several bits from earlier (and of course funnier) L&H films are thrown in at random to try and liven things up. Even I couldn't make it all the way through this dog; the Bowery Boys would've fired their writers for giving them a script this weak.

Writer Randy Skretvedt, who provides commentary for all three films and who wrote an indispensable book on the team, Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies, suggests that writer W. Scott Darling must’ve been viewing earlier L&H films such as Wrong Again to steal gags, but I suspect that Laurel himself suggested the bits in a vain attempt to keep the sinking ship afloat.
 
While viewing the DVDs I realized that Skretvedt's commentary was more interesting than the films themselves, and eventually just switched over to his commentary. It’s breezy, informational, fun, detailed, enthusiastic, and honest. Perfect commentary, and worth the price of the set. Other extras include trailers, newsreel footage, and a wonderful 27-min. film called Revenge of the Sons of the Desert, highlighting that organization’s 1986 gathering in Pennsylvania.
 
The films have been restored and remastered and look fine, for what that’s worth. You can see every line on Stan’s face, and every chin on Ollie’s neck. Unfortunately, only the most fanatical L&H fan could wring much enjoyment out of this set.

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