In 1927, very early in their teaming, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy made a rather famous short film called The Battle of the Century which featured an epic pie fight. The Boys didn't throw a lot of pies in their movies but in that one, they sure did. It was a two-reel comedy and the last half of the second reel was a street scene with dozens of people hurling hundreds of pies at one another.
Like most silent comedies, Battle of the Century was forgotten for a long time. In 1957, a man named Robert Youngson was assembling a compilation feature called The Golden Age of Comedy using clips of great silent movies. He got access to the negative of The Battle of the Century, duped the big fight at the end and used it in his film. What he didn't know was that in so doing, he was preserving that footage for all eternity. The negative was in bad shape and within a few years, it had completely decomposed. There was no other known copy of the film anywhere.
So it became a "lost film" but for the portions Youngson had saved. He had done some edits within the pie fight scene so he hadn't saved all of it but he had saved most of it…and for a long time, that was all we had. Laurel and Hardy fans wished, prayed and otherwise urged Fate (or something) to find a complete copy of the film but with each passing year, it looked more like an impossible dream.
But wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles! One day, a complete copy of the first reel turned up! It was a great find…and there was one added bit of film history, above and beyond the obvious. The first reel is about a prize fight with Laurel as a fighter and Hardy as his manager. In a few shots, a man is visible in the fight audience working as an extra. His name then was Louis Cristillo and years later, he would change his last name to Costello and team up with Bud Abbott. It's the only known path-crossing of Laurel and Hardy with Abbott and Costello.
Okay. So what we had then was the entire first reel and most of the last half of the second reel…not bad. Someone assembled a version of the film using all the footage known to exist plus stills and captions to explain the missing segments. That's the video I'm embedded below. It's the one we Laurel 'n' Hardy fans decided we'd have to live with since it was really, really unlikely that the rest of reel two would ever be located.
Well, guess what. The really, really unlikely thing has happened…or so we hear. According to this article, a good quality 16mm print of Reel Two has been found. This is such good news that some of us are worried it's a hoax of some kind. If it isn't, you may soon be able to watch a version of The Battle of the Century more complete than this one…
