This blog has gone too long without any Laurel and Hardy on it…and I suppose I should have clarified that Dick Van Dyke is my favorite contemporary performer. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were my favorite all-time performers…and probably Dick Van Dyke's, as well.
This is a clip from Los Calaveras, which is one of the films they made in a foreign language — in this case, Spanish — for the foreign market. Before it was technically feasible to dub or subtitle American movies, this was how they were exported overseas. Stan and Ollie actually filmed several of their films in English, then went back and did the dialogue scenes again in Spanish, German and/or French.
For the foreign versions, some new actors were brought in who were fluent in the language in question. Stan and Oliver spoke naught but English so a translator-coach would write their dialogue out on a blackboard just outside of camera range and The Boys would read the equivalent of phonetic cue cards. Apparently, the awkwardness of their speech was endearing to many audiences in other lands. In this clip, you can see Hardy especially glancing over to where the words are. You also see a brief appearance by Charlie Hall, a British actor who turned up in a lot of made-in-English Laurel and Hardy comedies and who probably had to learn his few words in a tongue he didn't speak.
Los Calaveras was, by the way, a short feature made for Spanish-speaking audiences by linking together two shorts made for America — Be Big and Laughing Gravy — along with some newly-written scenes that connected the two. The scenes below were all a part of the Be Big section…
