We now have an Amazon link to pre-order The Laurel & Hardy Giftset which, as explained here, is a new DVD collection of three of the later films of my all-time favorite performers, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The movies are Great Guns, Jitterbugs and The Big Noise, all of which were made for Twentieth-Century Fox in the forties, all of which represent them at their not-best. Still, the not-best of Laurel and Hardy was a lot better than the best of many other entertainers.
Having said these films are inferior, I am laying myself open to several angry e-mails from Laurel and Hardy buffs who not only like these films but who react to negatives the way you'd react to someone saying your momma was funny-looking and stupid. I disagree with these folks but in a way, I envy them: They have more Laurel and Hardy movies to enjoy without reservation. There are moments in all three (though fewer of them in The Big Noise) that I can savor. Most of all though, I find myself fascinated that two comic geniuses could take such a tumble merely because they stopped making movies at a studio over on Washington Boulevard and began filming for one over on Pico. We like to believe that it's the talent that matters, not the employer, but we're all aware that the employer can shackle or misassign the talent so as to handicap it.
A lot of things went wrong with Laurel and Hardy movies after The Boys left Hal Roach studios, starting with the fact that they didn't have as fine a support team, either in terms of supporting actors or writers, nor did Stan have as much control of scripts as he'd had at Roach. But also, there is something wrong with Stan and Ollie in the films, and it isn't just that they were getting too old for slapstick. Their timing, always so superb in earlier films, is just a beat off throughout their films for Fox (and the two they made later for MGM). Even the good jokes have a heavy-handedness that diminishes them. Both men — but Hardy, especially — always had this perfect sense of scale. Every reaction, every gesture was perfectly modulated for the camera, being just broad enough without being too broad. They — and again, Hardy especially — invented a kind of character comedy on film, perfecting it in the early sound era. When everyone else was scurrying to figure out how to replace wordless pantomime with wordy banter, Laurel and Hardy found the perfect balance almost from Day One. And left it behind when they abandoned the Roach lot.
It's not surprising. No great comedian has ever gone out on top. Charlie Chaplin's last films were embarrassments. Harold Lloyd's were disappointments. The Marx Brothers went Love Happy. And after talkies came in — and not because of sound — Buster Keaton made one movie after another that seemed calculated to make us forget what everyone once loved about Buster Keaton. Only W.C. Fields didn't despoil his exit from the screen with a lot of unworthy efforts but that was probably because he had the good fortune to die when he did. If he'd lived another ten years, we would have had some really lousy W.C. Fields movies.
The three movies on this new Laurel and Hardy set are not really lousy, except maybe in comparison to their previous efforts. The Boys fit the classic definition of the True Movie Star, which is someone you want to watch even when they're in a bad film…and like I said, there are moments in all of these. I'm glad they're finally being released on DVD in what promises to be a first-class presentation of prints and extras. I just wish I could watch them without thinking, "Gee, that scene reminds me of the really good version they did ten years earlier."