It wasn’t just for their own benefit, though. Stan & Ollie is based on that point in their career, during the post-war period. Witless innocence was their hallmark.”īut when their health was failing, they had trouble being funny. They were “interested more, as Hardy once said, in ‘human appeal’ than in ‘straight clownish antics.'” Describing what made them special in 1965, TIME noted that “they were lovable caricatures of the dolt in Everyman, a bow and fiddle striking delightfully dissonant chords in a mad world. Their relatability was a key part of what made them funny. They take failure and make it into something you can laugh about. They’re always trying to do the right thing, but get into a fine mess. “During the Great Depression, people are so desperate, and they need comedy,” says Louvish. They rose to fame at a period in history when Americans needed a good laugh. Their seamless transition from silent to sound pictures was notable, winning them recognition as “virtually the only silent comedy stars to repeat their phenomenal success in talkies, probably because their miming spoke louder than words.” And the hard work that Laurel & Hardy put into lugging a piano up a staircase in The Music Box clearly hit the right note with the Academy, as the film won a 1932 Oscar.Īnd their popularity went even deeper than their talent. Together, as TIME put it, they became Laurel - “slim, sad-eyed master mime” and “the brain behind the gags and the on-screen butt of them all” - and Hardy, “the master of mime and the bowler-bouncing doubletake” and “the withering glare.” They made dozens of silent film shorts in the late 1920s, such as Duck Soup, and began doing talkie shorts in 1929 and feature-length talkie films in the mid-’30s. Hardy was the son of an Atlanta politician, and studied law at the University of Georgia before he decided to pursue a career in singing. Laurel (born Arthur Stanley Jefferson in Ulverston, England) had been an understudy for Charlie Chaplin and a member of the London Comedians troupe run by Fred Karno, who is credited with having a role in launching Chaplin.
The funnymen were introduced to the public in the mid-1920s by Hollywood film and TV producer Hal Roach, who thought putting together a skinny Englishman and a rotund American would be comedic gold, says Simon Louvish, author of Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy and a visiting lecturer at the London Film School. Their third such tour, it would end up being their last tour together, due to the declining health of the duo TIME once described as “two of America’s few genuinely creative comedians.”
The movie is a fictionalized take on the comedians’ British tour in 19. The routine lasts just as long as it should, which is something you can’t always say about Laurel & Hardy’s features.Laurel and Hardy fans who rewatch the legendary comedians’ 1934 take on Babes in Toyland every Christmas now have the opportunity to see them in another movie: the new biopic Stan & Ollie, starring Steve Coogan as Laurel and John C. Perhaps the highlight of the package is “The Egg Skit” in which the pair and “Mexican Spitfire” Lupe Velez (playing herself) explore several creative ways of breaking eggs on each other. While not new, it’s a joy to revisit: It chronicles the history of short subjects from two-reeler silents to Laurel & Hardy to the Three Stooges and Our Gang comedies and the history of Vitaphone shorts made in Brooklyn all the way up to the mock-docs of people like Peter Smith (still shown regularly on TCM).Įxtras include a colorized fragment of “The Rogue Song,” a “lost” film directed in 1930 by Lionel Barrymore and several bits from 1934’s “Hollywood Party,” which really show the team at its best. Roly-poly Oliver Hardy was the yeoman actor and child of a slave-owning family whose roots in Southern gentility often surfaced in his comedy, even when tipping his hat meant getting a kick in the pants.Īnchored by two decent mid-career features - “The Devil’s Brother” (1933) and “Bonnie Scotland” (1935) - the collection also includes a 2002 docu about shorts, produced for Turner Classics Movies.
Elastic Stan Laurel was a child of the English musical hall tradition and a theater family, the “genius” of the team who was paid more than his chubby counterpart because he wrote and produced their material.