|
|
Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy
The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy.
Faber & Faber, London 2001; paperback 2002
St Martins Press, New York, 2002
No movie historian of the past twenty years has been more devoted to prewar Hollywood
comedy than Simon Louvish, and, after his definitive studies of W C Fields and
the Marx Brothers, he now completes the trilogy with Laurel and Hardy:
As always, he is more intrigued by (and expert on) the work than the lives, but
those who want an offscreen chronicle will find that both men have been adequately
covered in separate biographies. Here, though not for the first time, we get
them together: Stan, the local lad from Ulverston in Lancashire, joins Fred Karno's
stage army and, with his great rival Charlie Chaplin, travels to the New World,
there to meet up with young Norvell Hardy from the American South, a land still
scarred by memories of the Civil War.
They were to become perhaps the perfect double: the fat one and the thin one,
forever getting into `another fine mess'. They inspired weaker imitators: Abbott
and Costello, Little and Large, and all the others who thought team genius was
just a matter of being an odd couple of contrasting height and girth.
But Stan and Ollie weren't just the Sunshine Boys: they were a vastly more complex,
intricately crossreferenced couple,' whose triumph and whose tragedy were that
they only really existed as half a person each.
With full credit, Louvish frequently quotes the great Laurel-and-Hardy guru,
John McCabe, who has published at least four books on their lives and work since
1975. When updating, annotating or simply following up McCabe's leads, Louvish
refers to himself somewhat creepily as `your humble author', and there are indeed
times when the new book seems like a elaboration on all the others. But he does
bring a fresh critical eve to the movies, explaining even to such non-addicts
as myself their roots in the vaudeville theatres where both men started, and
usefully contrasting the very different British and American music-hall traditions.
In 1917 Laurel and Hardy both made their first, fleeting appearance in the silent
movie, Lucky Dog. In the following five years, Babe Hardy appeared in eight short
films either directed or co-written by Stan Laurel. Then, in the fall of 1926,
they worked together for the first time in a silent called Duck Soup, which bore
no relation to the later Marx Brothers classic of the same title. This one was
based on an old 1905 music-hall sketch with which Stan had toured the halls in
the North of England.
Stan was always the brighter of the two, the writer and director as well as the
stooge for Hardy's gargantuan bully. Their early training in silents for Hal
Roach (where Chaplin had also started out) (sic!!) made them immensely agile:
almost until the end, Ollie remained spectacularly light on his feet despite
his considerable bulk.
Both men made frequent and usually deeply unhappy marriages, and although they
went on filming together until 1951, it was really all over by the outbreak of
the Second World War. The bombs that fell on Pearl Harbor also decimated a world
of innocent comedy, of pratfalls and double takes, as cinema audiences began
to look for a more subtle and intelligent kind of cornedy.
After the war ended, as a kind of encore, Laurel and Hardy toured the few surviving
English music halls where Stan had started out before the First World War. Both
were now old and ill, forsaken by Hollywood: ironically, the great revival of
their movies on American television in the Fifties was of little financial benefit
to either of them, since all the rights had been reassigned years earlier,
Because of their frequent marital mishaps, neither man ever achieved the wealth
of Charlie Chaplin or Harold Lloyd, both far cannier Hollywood operators, and
their lives ended as tragically as those of most old hoofers.
Ollie died in 1957 after suffering three strokes. Stan lived on for another eight
years, unable to work: not for him the indignity that befell Buster Keaton, granted
a walk-on part in Sunset Boulevard and then fleetingly used by Chaplin in Limelight.
But Simon Louvish's best idea is saved for last. Who are Stan and Ollie but Vladimir
and Estragon, the tramps of Beckett s Raitu~rtr Godot? Another great comic, Bert
Lahr, got around to that one just before he died, playing Estragon in the original
production. Stan and Ollie, as so often, just missed that boat too.
 |
| |
|
|
|
|
