“A disaster of cataclysmic dimensions!

(... the Warden in Pardon Us)

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If disaster be the theme of this issue, then the films of Laurel and Hardy are leading contenders for such an accolade. It could in fact be said that Stan and Ollie were making disaster movies long before this term was coined to describe a latter-day movie genre. From the opening of Lucky Dog (Stan’s ejection by the landlady) to the closing of Atoll K (the arrival of the tax collectors), impending disaster is always just around the corner and its imminence well-signalled to the audience for anticipatory comic effect. The duo have only themselves to blame for every nice mess they land in . . . Ollie never learns that if he follows Stan’s ideas, disaster will surely follow.

 

Sometimes the disastrous consequences of their actions are merely embarrassing (Come Clean) but they can be fatal (The Midnight Patrol). But whatever the degree of disaster, others are inevitably sucked into the maelstrom they create and rarely emerge unscathed. Edgar Kennedy, Charlie Hall, James Finlayson et al deserve our commiseration for long-suffering at their hands. Consequences may be minor, such as disruption of drill formations in Pack Up Your Troubles or Flying Deuces or major, such as the scenes of mass chaos in the streets of You’re Darn Tootin' and The Battle Of The Century. Yet the sum total of these anarchic visions of society place the Laurel and Hardy films on a level where they can be interpreted as something more than mere slapstick comedy. Perhaps the event to which the Warden in Pardon Us referred is yet to come…

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The L&H fi]m collector has also had a fair share of disasters: incomplete prints of variable quality with a multiplicity of bogus titles, cut-downs and silent versions of sound films. Would you buy a book with missing pages or blurred type? Away with these abominations!!!

 

The L&H film spectator has not escaped what Stan in Any Old Port called a real- “Cats-after-me”. Those gleaming pristine black and white visions that 35 mm prints gave vanished into limbo, leaving us on sub-standard gauges mere shadows of their former glory. But worse is yet to come: no known prints exist of Hats Off (the silent precursor to The Music Box using the same steps and containing the apogee of the “hat routine” gag) or The Rogue Song (with our two friends providing the comic relief sequences in a 1930 two-strip Technicolor musical). Sic transit gloria.

 

And what is more, we have been deprived of little gems of Laurel and Hardy material which were filmed and then relegated to the cutting room floor for various reasons. Now only production stills remain to help us visualise what might have been: the planned ending for Their Purple Moment with the Boys escaping from the restaurant disguised as midgets, the prison fire and the final fishing scene in Pardon Us, the extra gags with the pool table in Brats, the interrogation scene and the snake gag in Bonnie Scotland etc etc. After The Unknown Chaplin, we now need The Unknown Laurel and Hardy, but only a miracle could produce that!

 

And that’s not the end of our misfortune: some of the foreign language versions contained extra

material not included in the American releases - but that’s another story…