Another Nice Mess

Laurel and Hardy were part of the landscape of my childhood, originally via the comics that were bought for me in the early-to-mid-1970s rather than their movies. These were the product of Larry Harmon, an entrepreneurial US entertainer who bought the rights to Bozo the Clown, a character he had helped portray, from his employers Capital Records, and then set up an animation studio to make Bozo cartoons. Now, I relate all this because I’ve only just found out about it. Most accounts say rather reticently that Harmon ‘purchased the rights to the visual image of Laurel & Hardy’ in 1961, which is odd given that they’d very deliberately played themselves precisely to avoid them being sacked and anyone else given their characters. The most likely explanation is the one Stan’s friend and biographer John McCabe seems to have given, that Harmon persuaded Stan to sign what he thought was a temporary licensing agreement for one cartoon show, only to realise afterwards that it in fact covered all further use of the characters. If the press reports at the time were accurate, Stan was rather up for this at first; but as time went on, nothing materialised, and he realised exactly what had happened (‘I think [Harmon] was afraid to let me see the pilot’ he wrote) he went very sour on the idea. After Stan died in 1965, there was indeed a short-lived and not very well-received TV cartoon show followed a few years later by the comics (published in the UK by Thorpe & Porter) and as much merchandise as Larry Harmon could get made. So the mouldering copies still in my parents’ loft and this battered little figurine are all products of the Harmon machine. My main surprise is that the comic apparently stopped being published in 1974 – can I really have been only 5?

A small child doesn’t go to movies for narrative, structure and content, but remembers fragments, gestures, and personalities, and Stan and Ollie’s films offer plenty of those. The pair are childlike presences themselves, moving through a world they don’t completely understand and with which they are very frequently at odds, which may be why small children identify with them, if they encounter them at all these days. They approach impending disaster with boundless optimism, and look back on it with bafflement, each movie setting them up for another twenty minutes or so of catastrophe completely unrelated to the chaos that might have befallen them in the one before.

This means that watching the films as an adult for a bit of nostalgic comfort in hard times is a different experience. Some – The Music Box, Towed in a Hole, Helpmates – remain brilliant examples of visual comedy, and in virtually all of them there is some episode which showcases Stan and Ollie’s superlative skill in timing, gesture, and facial expression. But quite a lot are a bit patchy. It’s true that the very early films were rattled off at breakneck speed: there’s one sequence in 1927-8 where both men have their hair abnormally short across several stories because they’d done one set in a prison for which their heads were shaved, and studio boss Hal Roach couldn’t wait for them to return to normal before starting filming again. By the time Laurel and Hardy were big stars, a bit more care was being expended even on these two- and three-reelers, but that doesn’t make them all great.

Then there are other considerations than the merely technical. The other night I rewatched Them Thar Hills and Tit for Tat, the only two Laurel & Hardy shorts which narratively follow on from one another, and then really only to provide the pretext for an escalating sequence of mutual insult and destruction with grumpy grocer Charlie Hall in the second film. They are both good, but the sour note is the horrible relationship between Charlie, and other longstanding Roach and Laurel & Hardy regular, Mae Busch. They play a married couple who in Them Thar Hills run out of gas on a trip in the mountains and decide Stan and Ollie’s trailer is a good place to ask for help, little anticipating the chaos that will ensue. They are already clearly not the most harmonious of spouses, but when Charlie returns with the car and finds Mae having a decidedly merry (if completely innocent) time with her new chums, courtesy of the well-water into which bootleggers have tipped several barrels of moonshine, he doesn’t take it well at all. We aren't supposed to like him, of course, but his rage-filled manhandling of Mae is likely to have modern audiences baying for his arrest. Unlike Stan and Ollie hitting each other with various household implements to the accompaniment of surreal bongs, this is a bit too nastily real.

A bit less violently, one can also detect in oneself a shift of sympathies. Blotto from 1930 is a nice little film in which Stan and Ollie go for a sneaky night out at a club after fibbing to Mrs Laurel (there is no Mrs Hardy on this occasion), and, to aid celebration in those Prohibition times, pilfer a bottle of liquor she has kept aside. Little do they realise that Mrs Laurel is wise to their risibly transparent plot and has replaced the drink with an unpleasant but entirely unintoxicating liquid. At the club – a stupendously jazzy set worth seeing just for that – they pass an increasingly inebriated and riotous evening, until Mrs L turns up herself and icily informs them that they’ve been drinking cold tea, whereon they sober up very rapidly. I didn’t realise that several minutes of the film were cut from its original release and only survive in the Spanish-language version Roach did for that lucrative market. The scenes – Stan and Ollie’s drunken interaction with a waiter and two dance acts at the club, one of them really quite exotic – fell foul of a later censorship regime, but don’t really add much.

The women in Stan and Ollie’s lives usually represent the dreadful shackles of adult existence and responsibility for which they are simply unfitted, and now we might find ourselves seeing them less as the shrews the writers probably intended and instead sympathising with them for having to deal with these overgrown kids. It helps that in Blotto Mrs Laurel is played by the beautiful Anita Garvin in a fantastic slinky dress (it looks black, but it could of course have been a variety of colours). The interaction between her and Stan is the best bit of the film and in her venomous expressions we are surely not wrong in seeing years of seething resentment at his perpetual idiocy. How did she end up with him, we think, and you can tell that thought isn’t far from her mind, either.

'She's in the kitchen'

Well, yes, she is

The stunning Rainbow Club before Stan & Ollie's big entrance

It's a short step from hilarity ...

... to the moment of sobriety.

Mrs Laurel is in the mood for revenge ...

... and, as the boys attempt to flee in a cab, enacts it.

Anita Garvin was a Hal Roach regular and appeared in several films with Laurel & Hardy. Interestingly, Roach tried to turn the lanky Garvin and diminutive studio-mate Marion Byron into a female comedy double act, but didn’t get very far with it: only one of their movies, the amiable little 1928 comedy A Pair of Tights, survives, one of the very last of the silents. Mrs Laurel in Blotto was the most extensive role she had with Laurel & Hardy, though she turned up again as Mrs Laurel a year or two later, in Be Big. She finishes both movies firing a gun at the pair, assisted the second time by Isabelle Keith as Mrs Hardy. Funny that.