"Two supremely brainless men, totally innocent of heart, and outrageously optimistic -- there is no one as dumb as a dumb guy who thinks he's smart." John McCabe
The availability of rare classic movies is definitely not on the list of less-than-wonderful things about living in the 2020's. The latest vintage celluloid goodness coming to Blu-ray is the earliest Hal Roach Studio films of Laurel & Hardy.
In our book, Laurel & Hardy remain the greatest of all movie comedy teams.
Some of us diehard classic movie buffs and comedy geeks have been watching Laurel & Hardy since their films were run on TV back in the 1960's. Let me repeat: it's true, believe it or not, movies starring comedy kings Laurel & Hardy, The Three Stooges, W.C. Fields and Abbott & Costello were frequently seen on television. Even Charlie Chaplin silents were shown on TV back then!
Amazingly, one of the local movie palaces in my town, WAY back when, presented Robert Youngson's comedy compilations Laurel & Hardy's Laughing 20's and Four Clowns on the big screen, much to the unending delight of this writer - and a decade before VCRs changed home viewing in the late 1970's.
Quite a few of the short subjects on the new Blu-ray, Laurel & Hardy, Year One: The Restored 1927 Silents, were produced so early in their tenure at Hal Roach Studios that the teaming is clearly in its embryonic stages.
It includes their first appearance together - not as a team - in the 1921 short subject The Lucky Dog, produced by G.M. Anderson, the "A" in Essanay Studios and star of countless westerns known as "Broncho Billy."
In The Lucky Dog, written and directed by Jess Robbins, Hardy plays a bad guy, not too dissimilar from the menacing heavies he would portray as a stock company member in the Vitagraph slapstick comedies of wacky comics Jimmy Aubrey and Larry Semon.
While a selection of Stan & Babe talkies was released on Blu-ray in 2020 and a few of the L&H silents have found their way to such DVD releases as Kino Video's Slapstick Encyclopedia, this latest Blu-ray is the first sighting on this format of their early Hal Roach Studio films.
In addition to their debut appearance together in The Lucky Dog, the compilation features the first films in which Stan & Babe worked together in the casts at Hal Roach Studios. Both had been working as supporting players, with Hardy having memorable turns in such Charley Chase comedies as Isn't Life Terrible and Fluttering Hearts. Stan also acted as a writer and director, most notably on comedienne Mabel Normand's series during her brief stay at The Lot Of Fun in 1926-1927.
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appear in these Hal Roach comedies as actors, not as a team, but they would increasingly work together and a partnership gradually emerged as the 1927-1928 season progressed.
L&H support Hal Roach Studios actor Glenn Tryon in 45 Minutes From Hollywood, part of the All-Star series they both appeared in. Babe appeared with former Fox Films star and uber-vamp Theda Bara in Madame Mystery, which was directed by Stan.
Also among the pre-teaming Hal Roach Studio films: With Love & Hisses, Duck Soup and Why Girls Love Sailors. In moments throughout, very early harbingers of the distinctive mannerisms L&H would soon employ as a comedy team can be seen.
What was the first Hal Roach Studios 2-reeler to officially or unofficially feature Stan & Babe as a team? That would be The Second Hundred Years, which debuted in theatres on October 8, 1927.
It's a hilarious prison break comedy in which the boys break out of the big house only to become staggeringly inept painters.
In particular on this set, The Second Hundred Years, The Battle of the Century and Do Detectives Think? come across as Laurel & Hardy films. Stan and Babe start functioning as a comedy team in these very funny short subjects.
The lineup on Laurel & Hardy, Year One: The Restored 1927 Silents is The Lucky Dog (1921), 45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926), Duck Soup (1927), Slipping Wives (1927), Love 'em and Weep (1927), Why Girls Love Sailors (1927), With Love and Hisses (1927), Sugar Daddies (1927), Sailors, Beware! (1927), The Second 100 Years (1927), Call of the Cuckoo (1927), Do Detectives Think? (1927), Putting Pants on Phillip (1927), The Battle of the Century (1927) and Flying Elephants (1928).
The Flicker Alley press release elaborates:Very few of the silent films of Laurel and Hardy's negatives survive, and the available elements scattered throughout the world are always mediocre or unwatchable. It took three years to gather all the surviving prints of these shorts, compare them shot by shot and give them the best digital restoration possible. Today, these invisible films look as young as they did 95 years ago.
A world premiere for all the Laurel and Hardy fans. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy first appeared on film together in 1921, after an initial period in their careers spent apart. The two would formally team up in 1927 and found success by following a simple comic formula that displayed the hilariously ambitious and anarchic qualities of their joint personality.
Laurel & Hardy: Year One, The Newly Restored 1927 Silents, as proudly presented by Flicker Alley and Blackhawk Films®, offers fans new and old the rare opportunity to observe the evolving partnership of the comedy team that would reach enormous popularity.
Featuring all new restorations sourced from best available materials contributed by archives and collectors around the world restored by Blackhawk Films® and Lobster Films in Paris, this comprehensive deluxe Blu-ray 2-Disc collection features thirteen extant films produced in 1927 and two additional films from before they were officially a team.
It includes new scores from some of the best silent film composers working today: Neil Brand, Antonio Coppola, Eric le Guen, and Donald Sosin. It is curated by film historians and Laurel and Hardy specialists; Randy Skretvedt, Dick Bann, Serge Bromberg, Eric Lange, and Ulrich Ruedel.
While he never went away, especially in the hearts of classic movie buffs and devotees of Fractured Fairy Tales, the great Edward Everett Horton is back as of today - and always a favorite at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog.
Not only is Eddie back, he's back on DVD as a headliner in silent movies. Yes, we kid you not, silents. The new 2-DVD set, mastered from Library of Congress 35mm prints, can be purchased here.
As fate would have it, Horton starred in a series of very funny 2-reel comedies produced for Paramount Pictures by Harold Lloyd's company, Hollywood Productions. He's incredibly funny in these silents and you can practically hear the mutterings of his character. No surprise that Mr. Horton would subsequently be a riot as a prolific comic character actor in countless 1930's - 1940's movies and TV shows through the 1960's.
Ben Model's Undercrank Productions, along with Steve Stanchfield's Thunderbean Video (now shipping its new Rainbow Parade cartoons compilation) and Tommy Stathes' Cartoons On Film our favorite DIY producers of classic stuff on Blu-ray and DVD, has officially released Edward Everett Horton: 8 Silent Comedies, featuring hilarious entries from this series. This release was the result of a successful Kickstarter last year, which we at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog were delighted to contribute to.
Mr. Horton has his legion of fans, so it did not take long for the original Kickstarter to meet and exceed its goal.
A principal purpose of this blog often is to plug new Blu-ray/DVD releases of very old movies, so, as a companion piece to last weekend's post, we plug yet another Blu-ray/DVD release of very old movies. We're fine with this - somebody needs to keep classic movies alive and introduce them to new generations - and Undercrank Productions, our cohorts of long ago at Kit Parker Films and silent comedy expert Dave Glass are among those who have been doing that with panache and style.
Four years ago on this day, this blog paid tribute to the great, timeless comedy of Hal Roach's Rascals a.k.a. Our Gang. The most successful series of "Famous Kid Comedies" by far was created by producer Hal Roach, studio director general Charley Chase, series writer/director and former fireman Robert McGowan and writer Tom McNamara back in 1922.
That said, it is fitting that today's Blu-ray plug-o-rama involves two outstanding Our Gang compilations by Classic Flix.
This Hal Roach Studio fan has the very good Cabin Fever VHS compilations of sound era Our Gangs, hosted by Leonard Maltin, and is delighted to see new restorations of these great classic comedies on Blu-ray. The 1929-1930 titles showcase one of the series' all-time best casts, combining new Our Gang stars with holdovers from the silent era - and, of course, the one, the only Pete The Pup.
Both Blu-ray sets cover what, for this classic movie buff, constitutes the peak of Our Gang: the early sound era, smack dab in the middle of The Great Depression.
What's particularly cool about this volume is the participation of Hal Roach Studio stalwarts Edgar "Slow Burn" Kennedy and Max Davidson, who have a field day and play off the gang beautifully.
Volume 1 features the first 11 Our Gang sound shorts, from the 1929-1930 season, mastered from original Hal Roach Studio film elements.
The earliest Our Gang talkies feature the formidable talents of Jackie Cooper, Allen “Farina” Hoskins, Mary Ann Jackson, Bobby “Wheezer" Hutchins, Joe Cobb, Jean Darling, Harry Spear and Norman “Chubby" Chaney.
The Little Rascals - The ClassicFlix Restorations, Volume 2 (Blu-ray) comprises 11 classic comedies, featuring Our Gangsters Jackie Cooper, Allen 'Farina' Hoskins, Mary Ann Jackson, Norman 'Chubby' Chaney, Dorothy 'Echo' DeBorba, Matthew 'Stymie' Beard, Donald Haines and Shirley Jean Rickert with key supporting players June Marlowe, Billy Gilbert, Mae Busch and Margaret Mann.
It is 225 minutes of peak Our Gang goodness, and the 1930-1931 season is among my two or three favorites in the series' 22 year history.
Even lazier than usual here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, having just completed travel from the Hudson Valley to NYC to JFK airport to SFO airport, with adjustment to the accompanying time zone change and weariness from the 3 hour delay in departure (because LOTS of folks are traveling now), we quote the blurb from the ClassicFlix press releases:
"Hal Roach's Our Gang series is one of the longest running and most prolific in the field of short subjects with 220 one- and two-reel comedies released between 1922 and 1944. The secret to the longevity of the series, as well as its appeal to generations long after its conclusion, is mainly due to Roach’s choice to cast kids who came across as “natural” on the screen—scruffy underdogs that moviegoers could identify with or wish they could be—not glossy “showbiz professionals”.
After producing 88 silent Our Gang shorts, Roach transitioned to sound releasing 80 “talkies” in the series starting with Small Talk in 1929. It took time to fine-tune the adjustment from silent to sound, but soon the studio began firing on all cylinders producing classics like Shivering Shakespeare and The First Seven Years (both 1930).
In Hollywood, the Hal Roach Studio was unofficially known as the "Lot of Fun", employing such mirthmakers as Laurel & Hardy and Charley Chase. But many of the company's most popular comedy shorts starred an aggregation collectively known as "Our Gang", a series whose premise was captivatingly simple: showcase a motley group of scruffy but lovable kids whose antics were easily identifiable to moviegoing audiences.
The series, later re-titled "The Little Rascals" for TV syndication, got its start in 1922 during the silent era, and transitioned to sound by the end of the decade. Early "talkies" in the franchise like Teacher's Pet (1930), School's Out (1930) and Love Business (1931) would prove to be some of their finest -- all of which are included in this volume and continue to entertain subsequent generations of classic movie devotees."
We await these two Blu-ray sets eagerly! In closing, acknowledgements and tips of a top hat worn by Arthur Housman in Laurel & Hardy's Scram go to Dave Lord Heath's excellent Another Nice Mess: The Films Of Laurel & Hardy website, which features an expansive section on the silent and sound Our Gang comedies produced by Hal Roach Studios. Indeed, Another Nice Mess is a treasure trove on all things Hal Roach Studios and one of frequent our go-tos - along with Jerry Beck's outstanding Cartoon Research website - at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog. By all means, if you use Another Nice Mess: The Films Of Laurel & Hardy for research and frame grabs, chip a donation in the website's direction. Also, Robert Demoss has created The Lucky Corner, an excellent website devoted to Our Gang.
Last but not least, there are the two evergreen tomes penned in the 1970's which are still the last word on the series, Leonard Maltin's The Great Movie Shorts: Those Wonderful One- and Two-Reelers of the Thirties and Forties (as well as the its trade paperback reissue as Selected Short Subjects) and The Little Rascals: The Life And Times Of Our Gang, which Leonard co-wrote with Richard W. Bann.
All of us at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog who have often laughed out loud watching Hal Roach's Rascals tip battered top hats worn by Arthur Housman, Raymond Griffith, Max Linder AND W.C. Fields to The Little Rascals: The Life And Times Of Our Gang, which did a beautiful job covering the series.
