Turner Classic Movies, God love 'em, is running one of the best Laurel and Hardy features on Wednesday morning. Our Relations airs at 10:45 AM on my coast. You can figure out when it's on where you are. It's scheduled for an hour and forty-five minute time slot even though the movie only runs 73 minutes, so that probably means at least one short subject immediately follows. TCM is sneaking in some real treasures this way so you might want to take that into consideration if you set your TiVo or DVR or VCR.
By contrast, the Fox Movie Channel is running what I consider the most disappointing Laurel and Hardy feature — The Bullfighters — early the morning of Saturday, September 30. Then on the following Monday morn, they have The Big Noise, which isn't all that much better. Still, as we say around this website, weak Laurel and Hardy is better than…well, you know.
But getting back to Our Relations…this is a film about which I have two glorious memories which I'll share with you here. If you don't like it, you can go to some other weblog.
Shortly after Stan Laurel died in 1965, a tribute film show was held at Royce Hall, which is on the U.C.L.A. campus: An evening of Laurel and Hardy films with Dick Van Dyke as host. How could any fan of Stan and Ollie pass that up? My parents and I went and I have a very vivid memory of Mr. Van Dyke arriving and taking a seat in the audience not far from us, sitting all by himself like any other attendee. Autograph seekers quickly engulfed him and I think this caused the folks running the evening to notice he was there and, in kind of an appropriate Rob Petrie way, in the wrong place. They scurried over and quickly led him to another seat that had been reserved for their guest speaker. To open the festivities, he made some brief and appropriate remarks, telling the story of how he'd first met Stan, of how much Stan had influenced him, and how Stan had lovingly critiqued a Laurel and Hardy impersonation on The Dick Van Dyke Show.
They then ran two shorts — The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case and The Music Box — followed by the feature, which was Our Relations. If you asked most fans of The Boys about those shorts, you'd hear that Murder Case is one of their lesser efforts and Music Box was them at their best. (It was the only one they made that won an Academy Award.) That night, an audience of mostly adults — but a fair amount of kids — howled at The Music Box but there was even more laughter for The Laurel and Hardy Murder Case. Make of that what you will.
Our Relations is a mistaken identity farce. Stan and Ollie are roaming around town. So are their twin brothers, Alf and Bert, who are seamen in town for the day. Neither set of twins knows that the other is about. The sailors pick up some floozies and later the floozies think Stan and Ollie are their dates…only Stan and Ollie are with their wives at the time so you can imagine what happens. Alf and Bert are also running around with a valuable ring that doesn't belong to them. The rightful owner and some gangster types think Stan and Ollie have it and this is already a lot more than you need to know. You've got two Laurels and two Hardys, plus Jimmy Finlayson and moviedom's eternal drunk, Arthur Housman. How could that not be terrific?
That night at U.C.L.A., it was, it was. I can think of maybe a dozen moviegoing experiences in my life when the entire audience — every single person around me — was totally consumed by laughter. I don't just mean a lot of people thought a movie was funny. That often happens. I'm talking about those too-rare times when it all gravitates to some higher plane and there's that sense of a very magical, special event taking place…something that transcends a mere cinematic experience. You're all part of it together, laughing at the same things at the same times and sharing that sense of giddy, helpless happiness. An awful lot of strangers walked out of Royce Hall that night, feeling they'd been among friends and experienced something memorable.
Four or five years later, I had another of those keepsake "everyone laughing together" evenings thanks to Our Relations. Elsewhere, you may have seen me write of the Los Angeles Comic Book Club, which met weekly for a few years in the late sixties at Palms Recreation Center in West Los Angeles. I don't think I've mentioned that some of our members also had a monthly group that was called the Silent Movie Club until the night I am about to describe when we ran a sound film. Thereafter, it was the Old Time Movie Club…and proud of it.
Most meetings, the program consisted of 8mm silent movies from our personal collections of Blackhawk Films and other companies that sold what then constituted home video. I had and still have a bunch of such reels of Chaplin, Langdon, Keaton and others. I no longer have a projector on which to run them or any reason to do so but I still have them. The club's officers — Barry Siegel, Bruce Simon and Steve Finkelstein — had similar collections and you could see all our films at the club if you paid the modest admission. There was even live musical accompaniment, courtesy of a talented fellow named Jeff Gluckson at the Palms Park piano. Every few months, all of this put enough loot in the treasury to rent a 16mm sound feature and give Jeff a night off. When they decided to get one with Laurel and Hardy in it, I recalled that glorious evening at Royce Hall and demanded Our Relations.
The club's only publicity came from a small listing in the Los Angeles Times but that week, it yielded a full house…more than a full house. I think the seating capacity of the room was around 100 and we had at least 150 crammed in there. People were sitting on the floor, on the tables, on each other…and no matter how uncomfy they were, they all loved the film. I was wedged between a wall and an older, somewhat portly woman who was sharing the piano bench with someone and literally crying from laughing so hard. Every few minutes, she'd double over and topple off her half of the bench, falling onto me, all the time giggling so wildly she couldn't get her bearings to get up. There were moments there when I wished we were running The Bullfighters, instead.
Our Relations is a great comedy but it won't seem anywhere near that funny on Turner Classic Movies. You had to be there, had to be with not just an audience but the right audience. That's one of the things I miss with home video. DVDs and the cable channels give us the chance to have our favorite old films in our own homes, more or less on demand. They just don't give us the chance to have them the way the filmmakers intended: With an audience.