These films were tremendously popular-in fact, too popular to suit Hal Roach’s distributor, as he told me in 1980: Since Stan and Babe only spoke English, interpreters would write their dialogue phonetically on a blackboard just out of camera range. Ten of the team’s releases were given the multilingual treatment between October 1929 and February 1931. The team had become wildly popular all over the world during the silent era, and after the introduction of sound, producer Hal Roach sought to retain Laurel and Hardy’s enormous worldwide audience by making companion versions of their new films in Spanish, French, German and Italian. La Vida Nocturna (1930) is the Spanish-language equivalent of the team’s short Blotto (1930), while Politiquerias (1930) is a greatly amplified version of Chickens Come Home (1930).
OLD LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES ARCHIVE
On March 27, 2011, UCLA Film & Television Archive will present two rare Laurel and Hardy featurettes. Stan Laurel is shown with Anita Garvin, who played his wife in Blotto, Linda Loredo from La Vida Nocturna, and Georgette Rhodes from Une Nuite Extravagante. Stan's extended, high-pitched laughter is so infectious that you can even see the actress performing with him struggling to control her smirk.Left: A publicity photo for Blotto and the Spanish and French versions.
OLD LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES MOVIE
The whole movie is chock full of great gags, particularly from Laurel - his being able to inexplicably use his thumb as a lighter or attracting a pack of wild dogs after fixing a hole in his shoe with a tough steak - but nothing compares to his performance when the ruthless wife of the saloon owner tickles him ferociously in an attempt to get him to surrender the deed to her. Another classic set piece arrives a few minutes later, when Stan and Ollie join in with a rendition of "On the Trail Of The Lonesome Pine," a song with which they will forever be associated thanks to a brilliantly funny vocal gag performed by Stan Laurel (with the aid of sound trickery). Once there, they enter a saloon, performing as they arrive an irresistibly silly dance routine to "At the Ball, That's All," with a Western-looking group of men sat on the porch outside. Stan and Ollie are heading to the Wild West on an important mission: to give the deed to a late man's gold mine to his daughter, who is lodging with "guardians" in the town of Brushwood Gulch.
Here is a rundown of the finest Laurel and Hardy flicks that you need to see. As the hit 2018 biopic "Stan & Ollie" attests, the appeal of the famous duo is as great as ever, as new audiences continue to rediscover their timeless comedies.īut even the greats can have an off day. Yet today, twice as many years away from the heyday of Laurel and Hardy as Vonnegut was when he wrote his book, "the Boys" are still remembered fondly.
It is telling of Vonnegut's pessimism that he also feels the need to tell us all the way back in 1976 that Laurel and Hardy are figures from "long ago," artifacts he assumed would soon be forgotten in the ruthless future he envisioned. In 1976, the cult writer Kurt Vonnegut published his eighth novel, " Slapstick, or Lonesome No More!" It reads: "Dedicated to the memory of Arthur Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy, two angels of my time." Though the names are unfamiliar, the accompanying caricatures - in their famous bowler hats and expressing their unmistakable smiles - give away who they are: Vonnegut's angels are Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, remembered today as the greatest comedy partnership Hollywood has ever known.
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