Two comedians are at present the most vital force in the American kinema, and good comedians are rare. They usually are to be found turning out a number of short films in quick succession with such skill that it becomes discouraging to think how good they might be with better material; and when found they usually end by taking themselves, or, what is worse, their humour, seriously. The first has happened with Bebe Daniels, the second with Chaplin. It is only a Harold Lloyd or a Buster Keaton who can survive promotion to full-length pictures. But Laurel and Hardy are still in the short-film stage, and yet their films, their methods, and material seem perfect. It is hard to imagine them being any funnier or having better stories. It is true that their humour is slapstick, but it is all the better for that; real and loud laughter is too rare in the kinema in these days of ╥silence for a talking session.╙ Not all their gags are new; Laurel and Hardy throw pies at each other, they drop heavy weights on their feet, and the picture which Laurel nails up falls on Hardy╒s head. They even use the time-honoured flypaper ╤ but with a difference. It sticks to Laurel╒s foot. After the usual business with getting rid of it, he turns his sock inside out to prevent it sticking on the floor, and the real point of the incident lies in what we are left to imagine. Their films are made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and so, though they are to be found everywhere, the surest place to see them is at the London Empire. When a Laurel and Hardy film precedes Greta Garbo╒s latest picture, as it did this week at the Empire, one may be sure of seeing American screen entertainment at its best; just as, when they are shown in conjunction with the beautiful and stirring ╥Turk-Sib╙ by the London Workers╒ Film Society, one may be sure one is seeing, in this Russian and this American film, the best that the kinema has to offer at the moment.
They have been making pictures for about two years, and the astonishing thing is that, though they have various directors, all their pictures have the same remarkable quality. Their gags may be old, and some of them may not always succeed in making us laugh, but they all succeed in holding their place in the film, and the quality which makes these films so irresistible is the relentless picture they give of logic carried to absolutely fantastic extremes. Here is no busy attempt to be funny; something just goes wrong, and in their attempts to repair it, either by making two blacks a white or in seeking to cover up a black with a white, they make a world which from everyday beginnings grows into a world of incredible and absurd happenings where people do what they feel they would like to do, where savagery is unchained and honesty would be defeated were it not that inborn deceit comes to its rescue again, so that Laurel and Hardy always escape.
Laurel is thin and Hardy fat, with something of the appearance of Paul Whiteman. Laurel is always in attendance on Hardy, but it is he who is the originator. Hardy has something happen to him, he turns to Laurel to suggest a way out, and Laurel suggests some things which would be quite all right were it not that he had overlooked the most important part of the problem. In ╥Big Business,╙ they are turned away from a house. Laurel therefore suggests going into the next street. They do. But unfortunately the house is a corner house, and it has an entrance in the next street. Laurel overlooks this, and they get turned away again. With their efforts to avenge themselves on the householder╒s roughness begins the flood of destruction in which their films always end. From a small beginning things that had begun to rock and totter fall about them. A picture falls down and a blind goes up; by the end of the film the ceiling is collapsing and the bed is broken. In ╥Big Business╙ they damage the householder╒s doorpost. In return for which he spoils the tree they are trying to sell. They then begin to destroy his house in earnest, while he starts to smash their car. One may be certain that however rich a room or splendid an automobile one finds them in at the beginning to a picture it will be fit only for a scrap-heap at the end. In ╥Two Tars╙ they go out for a ride, and head a long queue held up by a repair in the road. When they try to back they touch the car behind them. This is enough. Reprisals begin. Laurel and Hardy look at each other. Laurel nods. They remove a lamp from the other car. The owner then slashes their tyres. Laurel then bends back his radiator, and by this time all the cars in the queue are implicated. Doors are ripped off, hoods slashed, running-boards shattered, and by the time the cars are able to move again there is not one that can run normally on four wheels or with any ordinary amount of springs.
Logical Folly
Laurel and Hardy spread destruction in their wake. And yet they have always a perfectly valid excuse for doing it. Some little thing goes wrong at the start and they try to repair it. They are not to be blamed for that. They are not to be blamed for other people having such evil dispositions. If someone else rips their tyres they naturally want to retaliate. When they have got even with their aggressor they are prepared to move on ╤ but the other person will not let them, and then their fighting spirit is aroused. It is all quite logical, and this is the secret of their films. They roll on, like a snowball, from one small incident, and they are funny because of this and not only because of what they contain. Most of their tricks are excellently turned, and one thing follows another with great technical skill. Laurel and Hardy are also good pantomimists; Laurel is the best, though he is always the unfortunate one in their pictures, bullied and beaten by the larger Hardy. But he has a bland smile when troubles end or before they begin which is delightful, and his look of perplexed astonishment when Hardy will not see it was not his fault is one of the best facial expressions on the screen. One simple little look when he feels disaster impending is worth hundreds of feet of action or dialogue. But the real secret of their films is this unfailing formula of one idea being carried too far, of one idea developed to the exclusion of anything else. Laurel pursues his idÄe fixe through a world full of many conflicting ideas, and the havoc he wreaks in that world is something quite new in screen humour. Their best films are ╥Big Business╙ and ╥Two Tars,╙ but there are many others, silent and talking, and it is because they are to be seen all over the country, in kinemas of every size, that I judged them to be so popular as to justify consideration at length. They are not to be missed.
