Stan Laurel (né Arthur Stanley Jefferson) and Oliver Hardy (né Norvell Hardy) are still my favorite performers of all time. Starting at 9 AM (at the least on my TV) Monday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running a festival of their comedies, many of them shorts, many of them silent.
It starts with Do Detective Think?, which was technically not a Laurel & Hardy film even though they were the stars of it as a team of inept investigators. It was a short comedy in the Hal Roach All-Stars series, which threw together various combinations of comedians then under contract to the Roach studio. This one happens to feature them in roles roughly similar to the screen characters they later developed. Later All-Stars comedies cast them but not as a team, acting much less like what they later became. But it's a good film you don't often see unless, like me, you buy every single damned DVD of them that's released.
I have a special fondness for it because it was the first silent film of theirs I saw and I saw it the first time I went to the legendary Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue here in Los Angeles. I thereafter became a frequent patron of the place and in ways I can't quite explain, that had a lot to do — for good or ill — with who I am today.
Do Detectives Think? is followed in this order on TCM by Putting Pants on Philip, You're Darn Tootin', Two Tars, Habeas Corpus, Big Business, Unaccustomed As We Are (so named because it was their first real "talkie"), Double Whoopee, Berth Marks, Men O'War, Perfect Day, They Go Boom!, The Hoose-Gow, Angora Love, Night Owls, Brats, Blotto, Pardon Us, Sons of the Desert, Pack Up Your Troubles, Babes in Toyland, The Devil's Brother, The Bohemian Girl and Hollywood Party (which has Laurel & Hardy in it but not much of them). The last seven of these are features and Sons of the Desert is the best of the seven if you only want to DVR one.
This, as I say, starts Monday morning. It runs through Wednesday morning and later Wednesday, they have a whole bunch o' movies based on books by Charles Dickens. The following Monday, TCM gives us another whole day of Laurel and Hardy goodies, again sparing me from having to turn on my DVD player to see my faves.