Here's another Laurel and Hardy clip from the Spanish version of their 1930 feature, Pardon Us. In these scenes, they've escaped from prison and are hiding out in a gang of cotton-pickers by making themselves up in blackface. For obvious reasons, some of this has often been trimmed in English language prints of the film.
The movie had an interesting, patchwork history. This was the first feature in which Stan and Ollie actually starred. Prior to this, they'd made short films and done guest appearances in two other features. Pardon Us actually started life as a two-reel short but things got out of hand.
The Hal Roach Studio, where they worked, released their films through M.G.M. and it was not uncommon for Roach to borrow sets or other resources from the larger studio. M.G.M. had made a prison picture called The Big House and Roach secured a verbal promise that he could have use of the many cells and other penitentiary sets that had been constructed for that film…so Laurel and the team's gag writers started in on a short about The Boys behind bars. Then M.G.M. announced some extra terms. In exchange for the loan of the sets, Stan and Ollie would have to star in a film for M.G.M. Roach said no and decided he'd proceed with his prison comedy by building his own sets. When those sets wound up costing an absurd amount of money, the decision was made to turn Pardon Us into a feature.
The film's disjointed, episodic nature flowed from the fact that it was a big building erected on a small foundation, but also because it was filmed and then refilmed and refilmed. They edited a version of the film, previewed it, then went back and filmed new scenes based on the audience response. Then they edited it, previewed it again and went back and shot more scenes…and so on. The cotton-picking scenes were among the final add-ins. Then after the English version was declared final, they had to go back and shoot the foreign versions.
There were four of them — French, German, Italian and Spanish. The Spanish version, from which the following clip is excerpted, was entitled De Bote en Bote. All four were filmed at the same time. There were four supporting casts and a young Boris Karloff was among those hired for the French version. Stan and Ollie would film a scene in French, then the stage manager would call in the German actors and they'd film the same scene again in German. Then they'd bring in the Italian actors and so on. Shortly after all four were completed and edited, some additional trims were made in the English version. As a result, there are a number of scenes that appear in the foreign versions but not in the English. Then to further complicate matters and give headaches to us Laurel and Hardy fans, more trims were made in Pardon Us before it was released in America but were not made in the film when it was released in England under the name, Jailbirds.
When you add in those TV prints that omit the blackface scenes, you have a movie that may have set some sort of record for different versions. Here's the nine-minute Spanish language YouTube version…
