My DVR doesn't record short films well -- I get the end of one picture as a preface to the next: Laurel & Hardy are standing at a door that opens onto a blizzard. A gloomy gus stands next to them in greasy underclothes with a five-o'clock shadow. L & H are about to trudge out into the storm carrying a small mutt when a big cop in a rain-slicker appears. He points to a sign nailed on the door: SMALL POX QUARANTINE -- 'Now no one can leave for a month!' the cop says. The gloomy man says: "I just can't stand it!" He picks up a long-gun and strides decisively off-screen to the left. Then, we hear the gun fired not once but three times, while Stan & Olly do a double-take staring also off-screen to the left..
A wizened-looking harridan is holding a hatchet. She has an evil glint in her eye. She says to an elegantly dressed flapper: "You stay here and phone for an ambulance." Stan begins to whimper and, then, flees with the woman at his heels waving the axe at him. He leaps over a hedge and vanishes in the darkness.
James.Horne is listed as the director of four two-reel comedies produced in 1931 and starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The shorts are Be Big, Our Wife, Laughing Gravy, and Chickens come home. The films are made with an impeccably invisible camera style and editing -- the viewer has no sense of any technique intervening between image and what we see. (I believe there are perhaps two close ups in about 80 minutes of film.) The films are varied to some degree and show that the boys, as they are called, had greater range than sometimes attributed to them. Each of the films displays an esthetic of total destruction -- small things get broken, then, large things, and, at last, the whole set is generally destroyed. Each of the films contains images that can only be described as nightmarish -- scenes of paralysis and confinement that are palpably frightening. Most small children are frightened by L & H two-reelers. By contrast, no one has ever been afraid of a Charlie Chaplin picture. I will leave it to others to interpret this fact.
In Be Big, L & H live in adjacent apartments with their sleek-looking and stylish "flapper" wives -- women as polished and ornamental as hood ornaments. The boys have promised to take their wives to the Jersey Shore. (People don't have cars in this milieu -- they travel by taxi and train.) A drunk playboy who is a member of bizarre all-male club calls Ollie and tells him that the fraternity is planning a "stag party" in his honor. The men in this club wear weird get-ups including baggy jodhpurs and tight riding boots. At first, Ollie professes determination to stay with the plan to take the wives to the beach. But the playboy whispers some kind of blandishments into his ear (this is a pre-code film). Ollie is seduced and feigns sudden onset of something like a migraine in order to stay at home. The wives depart for the shore. Stan & Ollie have to get dressed in their club finery. Ollie puts on Stan's boots. When the error is discovered, Ollie tries to take off the boots without success -- they are too tight. Calamities proliferate over about 12 minutes: windows are broken, chairs and tables are smashed to tinder, Ollie gets a nail stuck in his buttocks, and Stan is trapped in a Murphy bed that folds back into the wall when he is entangled in it. The wives find that their train won't depart until the morrow and come back home. When they discover the boys' misconduct, they take shot-guns and blast away at the bed in the wall where L & H are hiding. This knocks down the back side of the house which seems about to collapse. (The plot is a sketch for the sublime Sons of the Desert made four or five years later.) The scenes in which Stan and Ollie struggle to remove the boot are nightmarishly protracted and fantastically ingenious.
Our Wife involves preparations for Ollie's marriage. Stan manages to destroy a stack of sixty plates, a variety of pieces of furniture, while Ollie is propelled into the kitchen which he batters to pieces. Of course, Stan sprays the cake with Flit because there are several pesky flies in its frosting. It doesn't matter, of course, because Ollie ends up face-down in the cake in the ruins of the dining room. Meanwhile, the chubby bride's father (James Finlayson) refuses to allow the wedding and locks the woman in her room. Ollie and Stan plan an elopement. But, first, they have to get the woman out the window of her upstairs bedroom. "You get a ladder so we can elope," Ollie tells Stan. After a series of catastrophes involving the ladder, Ollie finally gets the big woman out of the house. But Stan has rented a comically small car. It takes five minutes to cram the two Botero-sized figures (Ollie and his fat wife) into the tiny car and, then, Stan (the best man) has to get in as well -- this sequence is hellishly claustrophobic and the stuff of which nightmares are made. When the couple finally reach the Justice of the Peace, the old man is severely cross-eyed: he marries Stan to the fat woman accidentally and when he says that he will "kiss the bride", he plants a wet one on Ollie. Stan whimpers while the Justice of Peace's lesbian daughter glares at him in a steely way.
Laughing Gravy begins with the boys in bed with Stan suffering from hiccups. It's a gloomy, shabby genteel room in a boarding house. The boys have smuggled a little dog into their apartment; this is Laughing Gravy. A blizzard is raging outside. The landlord hears the dog barking at Stan's hiccups and puts the dog outside. Ollie goes out to get the dog and gets locked out in the storm. "Tie two sheets together and pull me up," Ollie tells Stan who is standing at the upstairs window. You can imagine how this turns out. Ollie ends up in a barrel full of freezing water. Later, the boys end up on the roof of the house in the blizzard. The chimney is destroyed and much of the house. The grumpy gloomy landlord destroys the kitchen and gets caught in a half-wrecked cabinet. People are bonked in head by bricks and ceiling plaster cascades down into beds that flatten-out under the impact. At last, the landlord orders Stan & Ollie with Laughing Gravy to leave the boarding house, but, then, a policeman arrives...
Chickens Come Home is uncharacteristically opulent and, apparently, shot on the set of one of the studio's upscale drawing room comedies -- interior walls are touring and there's a comparatively large cast. L & H are "Dealers in High Grade Fertilizer" with an impressive office and about a half-dozen female clerical workers. Ollie, in fact, is running for office -- he wants to be Mayor. Both of the boys are married to the same sleek flappers that we saw in Be Big. (There's a good gag at the beginning -- Stan appears stylishly dressed for business carrying a fly swatter -- he says that he has just come from the "sample room.") A sinister vamp appears -- she's an apparition from Ollie's past and carries with her a photograph from the sea-shore: Ollie has lifted her up on his shoulders. It doesn't look too scandalous but, apparently, Ollie believes the picture will sink his putative career as a politician. He agrees to make a settlement with the vamp. (There's lots of hiding people in a small room, a WC apparently, and, at one point, Ollie gets the woman's white boa-like fur piece caught in his ass so he wears it behind him like a tail. Mirrors and doors are destroyed.) Meanwhile, Stan's wife is meeting with a nasty harridan who says that all men are vicious -- "I should know I've had five of them," the harridan declares, toying with her hatchet. (Why is she armed with a hatchet?) Stan is sent to the vamp's vast and Moroccan-themed apartment to negotiate with her while Ollie hosts a party with the elite in town. The floozy overcomes Stan and appears at Ollie's party. Ollie tries to conceal her (and the incriminating picture that Stan has brought). He has to keep bribing his smarmy butler, played by Jimmy Finlayson. Lots of furniture and crockery are destroyed. Finally, the vamp confronts Ollie who says that he will shoot her and kill himself -- a revolver has materialized. The vamp gets knocked unconscious and Ollie and Stan try to spirit her away -- they collude to create a towering figure with the vamp's upper body supported by Stan and Ollie who are hiding under her dress and what appears to be part of a tapestry. (The grotesque figure surmounted by the floozy's pale, motionless face totters though the house, a genuinely alarming apparition and her form mimics the incriminating picture from the beach.) Of course, the charade collapses and Ollie's face appears between the vamp's knees (which actually belong to Stan). The harridan who has warned Mrs. Laurel about the perfidy of men appears with her axe and... (The film seems to be parodying some other movie -- but I can't identify it.)
These films are genuinely funny. You will laugh out loud. And they are also grotesque and fearsome.
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