Tag: Oliver Hardy

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Pardon Me, I’m With "Stupid"

I don’t know what possessed me when, on a trip up to Manchester last week, I walked into a store and purchased a 21-DVD box set of shorts and feature films starring Messrs. Laurel and Hardy. Silent two-reelers, early talkies, as well as their reworkings in Spanish and French. Even rediscovered snippets of a German version of Pardon Us titled Hinter Schloss und Riegel. I guess, discovering Oliver Hardy’s feminine side a few weeks ago up in Ithaca, New York, and stumbling upon Hal Roach’s grave in nearby Elmira got me into this fine mess.

As mentioned earlier, I generally turn to Harold Lloyd for laughs generated by flying pies, pratfalls, and assorted pickles. After years of copying earlier masters, Lloyd hit on just the right formula with his clever combination of slapstick, wit, and romance. None of the sentimentality that makes the coy and ingratiating Chaplin such a turn-off for me.

Sure, the romance in Lloyd movies is of the old boy-meets-girl variety. By comparison, the emphasis in the works of short-tempered Mr. Hardy and his feeble-brained pal is on male bonding. Years ago, I taught a course examining definitions and boundaries of friendship in American culture. I might well have included this odd couple in my discussions. What, besides a chance at getting even after suffering insult and sustaining injury through mutual ineptness, kept those two together?

Shorts like “Helpmates” reveal that Hardy did not have a happy home. Well, by the end of it, he does not have much of a home at all, once Laurel, the home wrecker, is through with his botched efforts to assist in cleaning up after a wild party held in the absence of Hardy’s formidable missus. “Our Wife,” in turn, suggests that Laurel and Hardy are best wed to one another; and “Their First Mistake” shows them as a couple raising the baby Hardy adopted to keep his marriage from falling apart. Too late. Returning with the infant, Hardy discovers that he has been abandoned by his wife, who accused him of thinking more of Stan than of herself. “Well, you do,” Laurel agrees. “We won’t go into that!” his friend retorts.

No doubt, their violent, destructive streak is their way—and Roach’s as well as America’s—of dealing with men having feelings for one another in a manner that might be deemed bad mannered or puerile, but that does not raise suspicion in mainstreamed minds. Their Tom-and-Jerry-foolery was a precursor to those 1980s buddy movies. Screwball comedy without the girl.

“Should Married Men Go Home?” another of the pair’s outings invites viewers to debate. I did not ponder such questions much when last I watched Laurel and Hardy in action. I had never even heard the two of them speak in their native Englishes. What I heard them say had been in German, in which language they are known as “Dick und Doof” (Fat and Stupid). Not the kind of sobriquets to instill respect for their craft or encourage intellectual engagement.

Well, it was I who ended up looking pretty “doof,” staring at various screens on which I expected Laurel and Hardy to appear. “Me and My Pal,” the title selected for this evening’s small-screening, simply refused to emerge in anything other than an unintelligible mosaic of greenish pixels. So far, my picture of their relationship, its secret and extent, is hardly much clearer than that . . .

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Going Ithaca; or, A Hardy Welcome

Traveling through Upstate New York on a weekend in summer without having called ahead for reservations is like entering a lottery with money you owe to a loan shark with particularly keen nostrils. It is a heck of a gamble. While not the Vegas type and averse to mixed metaphors, I prefer vacationing without a safety net; but to the one driving and hoping for a bedpost instead of yet another signpost pointing to some rural spot barely traceable on the map it can be rather a pain in the hard-pressed posterior.

“There’s no room to be had in Ithaca,” we were warned one stormy evening by the proprietor of a second-hand bookstore in Dryden, a little town in the Finger Lakes District. That was Saturday, 21 June, which happened to fall on the second day of this year’s Ithaca Festival, the weekend Ithacans set aside to celebrate themselves and, by so doing, apparently draw considerable crowds to augment their population so as to justify every overpriced motel bed in town.

We had experienced difficulties with accommodations (make that impossibilities) on the previous night up in Saratoga Springs, where even the bedbugs were lining up for the tiniest of places to flop due to some rock concert of which we, who would much rather listen to a piano being tuned by Florence Foster Jenkins, were altogether, though not, as it turned out, altogether blissfully unaware.

Well, there was a room to be had in Ithaca. And not just a room, but a view, as well. That view, at some remove from the rather fancifully named Meadow Court Inn, was up in the balcony of the old State Theatre. We were being treated, free of charge, to a screening of a silent movie shot on location in Ithaca, which, as Aaron Pichel informed us in his extensive notes on the film we were about to see, was a center of motion picture production during the early days of narrative filmmaking.

Directed by the brothers Leopold and Theodore Wharton, The Lottery Man (1916) features a young Oliver Hardy (shown above) in the role of Maggie Murphy, a cheerful maid who ditches a chance at riches for the fellow servant she loves.

The audience at the old State Theatre was largely local. We could tell by their cheers. They recognized buildings and streets (pointed out to us in the program) and expressed themselves appreciative of this off-Hollywood production in the mounting of which several long since departed townspeople had been actively involved both behind and in front of the camera.

Based on a Broadway stage success of the same title and starring two of the original cast members of the 1909-10 production, The Lottery Man is a clever little farce that tells the story of an impecunious but resourceful college student who offers himself as prize to any woman daring or desperate enough to purchase a dollar ticket, only to realize that he has fallen in love and is jeopardizing a chance at matrimonial happiness by attempting such a money-raising stunt.

Among the luckless and disgruntled ticket holders shown in a climactic crowd scene were quite a few poorly disguised males, which brought to mind the recent policy changes in the State of New York owing to which the state of matrimony no longer demands that an Oliver in search of a husband either pose as Olivia or propose to one instead.

The little known and seldom shown Lottery Man, which, as of this writing, has yet to receive five votes on the Internet Movie Database, was ably accompanied that night by the jovial Philip Carli (pictured), one of a rare but according to him far from threatened breed of entertainers. The fact that we number among our friends a silent movie composer/accompanist who wrote a radio play-turned-television drama about Laurel and Hardy added further significance to this unexpected outing at the end of a long drive along the Mohawk and down Cayuga Lake.

Sure, the moviegoing experience might have been enhanced by the presence of a projector (the film was screened digitally); but I, for one, was glad to have been part of this special event at a night on which we could have hoped for nothing more than a roof over our chowderheads.