Laurel and Hardy: The Silent Years (1927)(Review)

There’s a special joy in watching silent comedy legends before their personalities were fully formed, seeing the gradual snowballing of their characters until we get the iconic figures we know and love. Eureka’s new boxset collects the early works of Laurel and Hardy, chronicling their efforts before they mastered the art of getting into another fine mess. The greatest hits are all well and good, but for the fans, it’s the early jam sessions that are most valuable, and that’s what this collection aims to provide.

Starting with The Lucky Dog, it’s a starring piece for Stan Laurel in which he’s a little more streetwise than we know him, rising from a bum to the beau of a wealthy girl thanks to an adorable dog. There’s shades of A Dog’s Life in the premise, but the comedy is much more raucous, with a dynamite filled fistfight in a mansion that feels like Mack Sennett, not Chaplin. Oliver Hardy appears in a brief role sticking up Laurel, but the two wouldn’t meet again until 1926 while making 45 Minutes to Hollywood for Hal Roach. It’s Laurel who draws the short straw playing a moustachioed out-of-work actor, while Hardy is a house detective harangued by his abusive wife – whose furniture-throwing antics echo Mae Busch in Sons of the Desert some eight years later. 

The film is a forgettable affair, unlike the next collaboration in the collection, Duck Soup – which should not be confused with the homonymous Marx Brothers film (or the DJ duo of Barbra Streisand fame). The duo play two tramps fleeing the forest rangers who wind up at a luxurious LA mansion, and madness ensues when they’re forced to pretend that they’re Master and Maid for a visiting couple – including Laurel in a rather unconvincing mob cap. The broad outlines of their personalities are finally outlined here, especially Hardy’s bluffness and Laurel’s hysterics, so it’s no surprise that this is the most effective film on the set so far. 

The next two films on the set, Slipping Wives and Love ‘em and Weep, find the boys playing second fiddle to others. Slipping Wives has Priscilla Dean trying to make her neglectful husband jealous using Laurel’s gormless paint salesman Ferdinand Flamingo, but despite the presence of a real star in Dean, there are only so many jokes about what can get stuck to the top of a top hat before the film grows tiresome. Love ‘em and Weep is a vehicle for Scottish comedian James Finlayson, playing a wealthy businessman who finds Mae Busch’s floozy re-entering his life, so he forces his aide (Laurel), to make sure she doesn’t sabotage an important dinner party. It fares a little better than Slipping Wives thanks to the presence of real comedians in the lead roles (Busch, Laurel and Finlayson), but the interplay between Laurel and Hardy is disappointingly limited.

Next is Why Girls Love Sailors, where Laurel fights to protect his beloved gal Nelly from the lecherous advances of his captain. What starts as a goofy knockabout (involving some classic Laurel tizzy action), soon takes a bizarre turn as he eliminates members of the crew by assuming various disguises to ensure Nelly’s safety. This includes dressing as a woman to lure the sailors into confrontation with Hardy’s roughhousing first mate, only for the captain to take a liking to Laurel’s floozy disguise. Hardy continues to raise hell in Love and Hisses, where his Top Sergeant Banner tries to make life a misery for Laurel’s dopey recruit Cuthbert Hope – although even he has got the formidable Captain Bustle to deal with. The mixture of bully and clumsy is getting closer to perfect, and With Love and Hisses is the best we’ve seen it so far, right down to the absurd chase involving a poster for DeMille’s The Volga Boatmen.

Disc two starts with Sailors, Beware!, with cabbie Laurel finding himself onboard a luxury liner, trying to collect his fare from a passenger. The gags are gradually getting more refined, including an excellent moment involving a skipping rope, but it’s mostly Laurel’s show – unlike Do Detectives Think?. The duo are hired to protect a judge from the vengeful “Tipton Slasher” in their signature suits and hats, and what follows is a comedy/horror that feels right at home alongside The Cat and the Canary. Chronologically made in 1927 but released in 1928, Flying Elephants feels like a nod to Keaton’s Three Ages in its caveman vs. caveman narrative. Laurel’s charmingly pixyish caveman who skips his way through the underbrush in search of a mate is a highlight, but it lacks any real structure, which is presumably the reason it was shelved.

Sugar Daddies has Laurel and Hardy as the lawyer and butler of a blackmailed oil tycoon, played by James Finlayson with a rubber cranium. The duo rework their tall woman routine from Love ‘em and Weep into an eight minute sequence involving a funfair to triumphant effect, and at only sixteen minutes, it’s the shortest film in the collection – but really rather sweet for it. The Second 100 Years, meanwhile, is the boys playing prison break in a host of gags to get out of Sing-Sing, including tunnelling into the Warden’s office and painting the town white. By this point the duo were such successes that they made an appearance in Call of the Cuckoo, Hal Roach’s star-studded short about a family moving into a new house to escape a lunatic asylum.

That was a minor stepping stone compared to the final two films in the collection, the penultimate being Putting Pants on Phillip. This is the first film with the pair as an official duo, with American Hardy dealing with a Scottish Laurel in a culture clash comedy that involves much humour about what men wear underneath a kilt – but in a light and affectionate vein. The final film on the collection is its crowning glory, Battle of the Century with its famous pie fight, and it’s a perfect example of the “tit for tat” style of gag they would perfect in Big Business. Here, an innocent mistake involving a banana peel turns into an all-out brawl with an entire street’s worth of pies, and it’s the most beautifully constructed short in the collection – a single idea perfectly stretched beyond breaking point. It’s a development that feels particularly rewarding once you’ve seen everything that’s come before, and only in the context of their earlier missteps does Battle of the Century feel like genuine brilliance. 

The collection’s highlight is the image quality, and gone are the days of crummy 16mm dupes, each film having been remastered in 2K from high quality prints that are worth the price of admission alone. Each receives a score too, with some from piano maestro Neil Brand, some having raucous sound-effect filled tracks that are evidently from their ’30s re-releases, and all having a bouncy feel perfectly suited to the light-hearted antics onscreen. There’s at least one commentary per film, and the whole boxset is complemented by a collector’s booklet featuring writing from Have I Got News For You’s erstwhile silent comedy fan Paul Merton. This is definitely one for the Sons of the Desert rather than the newbies, but if you like Laurel & Hardy, you need this in your collection.

Ethan’s Archive – Laurel and Hardy: The Silent Years (1927)