As you may have figured out from this website, there's darn near nothing I like better on a movie or TV screen than the finer exploits of Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Hardy. Today's video link, however, is not a Laurel and Hardy comedy even though it's often mistaken for one. Matter of fact, the people at Veoh, who used to host this treasure on their website, didn't seem to know the difference.
This is The Paperhanger's Helper, starring Oliver "Babe" Hardy and Bobby Ray, originally released under the title, Stick Around. It was shot by a Hollywood studio called Arrow Films and came out in March of 1925. By the time it was released, Hardy had finished another film or two for Arrow with Ray, then moved over to work for the Hal Roach Studio. There, the following year, he teamed with Mr. Laurel and…well, you know what happened. On several occasions, Hardy would cite The Paperhanger's Helper as a kind of foreshadowing of his on-screen work with Stan. You can see a lot of the Ollie/Stan relationship in it, and some who've studied such things say this is the first film in which Hardy does his famous long-suffering stares into the camera lens. The two men are even wearing derbies.
Many versions of this film abound, including one common one with titles that say the other guy is Laurel. (Some sources, by the way, will tell you this was from 1915. They're wrong about that, too.) Embedded below is a print just shy of nine minutes. It came from the legendary Castle Films home movie company, complete with their title cards and a music score that they probably added. Take a gander…