The Discreet Charm of Laurel & Hardy

Who can think of Laurel & Hardy without feeling a secret smile open up like the afterglow of a touch of brandy?

At the same time, is there anyone among us who can’t recall at least half a dozen episodes whose comic effect is so cumulatively explosive that they continue to reverberate in mind long after we’ve seen them?

Sixty years after the beginning of their amazing partnership, it’s surprising how little Laurel & Hardy have been played up in the body of critical comment devoted to Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton and, to a lesser extent, Harold Lloyd, Mack Sennett and the Golden Age of American film comedy itself, which began in the late teens and petered out by 1940.

Perhaps that’s because critical reflections on the 20th Century have tended to focus on alienation and the forces of darkness, of humanity scourged by its illusions of gleaming systematic progress. The modern temper likes its laughter hollow and derisive, its plucky comedic heroes bent as much on revenge as survival. That’s why Chaplin’s our emblematic man, all bent out of shape in the pulverizing industrial intestine of “Modern Times”; or why Groucho’s sharp-voiced insinuations alone aren’t enough to bring down Margaret Dumont’s hauteur--he needs to leave her a humiliated shambles.

Maybe it’s because Laurel & Hardy weren’t quite of the 20th Century. Stylistically they belonged to the tradition of the English music hall (as did Chaplin, whom Laurel understudied at the Fred Karno London Comedians troupe). Thematically they were late Victorians, sexually discreet to the point of boyish timorousness; they didn’t challenge huffy authority as much as they unintentionally subverted it in chain reactions of epic chaos.

Or perhaps it’s because, of all the comedians who have pratfalled and panicked, jigged and schemed, tippled, ogled and have been riotously chased off the screen by posses of injured righteousness, Laurel & Hardy were simply the most enchanting.

They had their stylistic signatures--Ollie’s fastidiously decorous hand-gestures, his tie-twiddle and direct stare at the camera; Stan’s sleepy-time reactions, his whisk-broom hair style, his contrite crying jag, the down-at-the heels walk that made him appear as though he were trudging through wet concrete.

Sixty years after they first officially teamed up in “Putting Pants on Philip” (the 13th movie in which they both appeared), there remains something about them that resists touching for fear of spoilage. They had a quality that can’t be intellectually decanted.

Their charm endures, as well as their influence. They were natural, if unconscious, prototypes for the most revolutionary work of the postwar Western theater, Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.” Marcel Marceau treasured them (Laurel was an early champion of Marceau’s work). Political figures as disparate as Franklin Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini enjoyed private screenings of Laurel & Hardy films, perhaps not only for their merits as comedy diversion, but because their quality of self-contained naivete had to be a small source of nostalgia for anyone dealing in Realpolitik.

In fact, they were the rage of weary postwar Europe, which adored them as unvanquishable symbols of lost innocence. They were perennial top-10 favorites through the 30s and their influence is still felt in Hollywood. In “Planes, Trains and Automobiles,” John Candy and Steve Martin show a contemporary similarity to the L&H; partnership, and even restore some classic old sight gags of automotive carnage, including a calamitous backing in through the window of a motel.

Their Gradual Beginning

No one at first had any idea of their extraordinary potential, least of all Laurel and Hardy themselves. They kept bypassing each other in one- and two-reel shorts, often appearing without working together, until director Leo McCarey, as well as a few others on the Hal Roach lot, began to pick up on the chemistry between them.

Their backgrounds were disparate. Stan was born Arthur Stanley Jefferson on June 16, 1890, in Ulverston, an English town near the Scottish border, to an actress named Madge Metcalfe and a father named Arthur J. Jefferson, an actor, director, manager and all-around theatrical entrepreneur.

In 1910, he joined the Fred Karno troupe. Karno was one of the most extravagantly successful theatrical impresarios of his day. Stan understudied Karno’s star--Charles Spenser Chaplin--and made two American tours, playing almost every role in the company’s feature, “A Night in an English Music Hall.”

When Chaplin left Karno in 1912 to join Mack Sennett, Stan stayed in America to play the little tramp as part of a vaudeville act, that lasted a decade (his first film was the 1917 “Nuts in May”). The name Laurel was suggested by one of his vaudeville partners (and his common-law wife), an Australian named Mae Charlotte Dahlberg Cuthbert.

As he settled more and more into film work, it’s a little surprising to learn, as Randy Skretvedt reports in his informative book “Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies,” that he thought of himself principally as a gag writer. That may owe to the way his pale blue eyes washed out in the early films, lending him an alien-from-outer-space look. Or it may be that, for all the vaudeville styles he played, he took a long time finding his own.

Skretvedt quotes George Stevens, who was a cameraman before he went on to directing such notable films as “A Place in the Sun” and “Shane”: “. . . Before beginning at Roach, I had seen Stan work and thought he was one of the unfunniest comedians around. . . . He needed and wanted laughs so much that he made a habit of laughing at himself as a player, which is extremely poor comic technique. How he changed!” (Stan eventually won a special Academy Award, in 1961.)

Once Stan found himself as the good-hearted naif who appeared as though he couldn’t shake all the way out of a deep sleep, he became irresistible. Despite some stormy marriages and professional strains, he had always been a fundamentally gentle soul. George Burns, who knew him from vaudeville, summed him up best when he said, “You wanted to take him home.”

Ollie’s Early Mastery

Ollie was a natural for the movies. Though he came up at a time when exaggerated vaudeville effects were the vogue (he started out playing one-reel comedy heavies), he seemed to have a born knowledge of the subtle differences that movies required of performance.

He was a superb film technician who understood how to play to a camera. He knew scale, timing and how to work up character and moment through an accumulation of modulated details (a quiet example of his authority can be seen in “The Fighting Kentuckian,” the 1950 movie with John Wayne in which Hardy’s serious character work--he played Willie Payne--has no stylistic connection whatsoever with his comedy).

He was far from a cold or impersonal performer, however. He sailed into his comedy roles with a courtly, almost baroque gestural rigging drawn on the manners of the Old South that was both decorous and fond. He seemed to revel in discreet flourishes, but they always clearly disguised a deep sense of discomfiture, a self-conscious desire to please, to be socially correct. He was a truly delicate big man.

Norvelle Hardy was born in Harlem, Ga., on Jan. 18, 1892. His father was a popular local politician and lawyer who died when his son was a young child--Norvelle later took on his father’s name, Oliver.

He became an habitual observer of humanity after his mother, by then living in reduced circumstances, took over a small hotel in Madison, Ga., and Ollie spent a good deal of time watching people’s comings and goings in the lobby. He was prideful and shy--and big: He scaled 250 pounds by the age of 14. He was a good singer all of his life (he was always ready when impromptu musical sessions broke out between takes on the Roach lot). He studied voice at the Atlanta Conservatory of Music, though for a while he was a listless student of law at the University of Georgia.

The movies changed everything. In 1910, he opened the first movie house in Midgeville, Ga., and ran it for three years. There had to be something about watching speeded-up comedy antics flutter in the dark that took one out of the self-consciousness of being a fat guy (though by all accounts Hardy was a cheerful kid), and out of the private dismay and sense of imbalance of growing up fatherless.

He decided to join the fun. In 1913, he started out with Lubin Motion Pictures in Jacksonville, Fla., as a heavy in one-reel comedies (and picked up the name “Babe”--which he preferred for the rest of his life--from a local Italian barber who liked to powder his chins “like a babe-ee”). He worked fairly regularly for five years with Lubin, Vim and Edison Pictures, and by the time he settled in California in 1918 he was already an accomplished screen actor.

“The gestures that Hardy did were his,” Hal Roach told Randy Skretvedt. “The tie, his looking into the camera, and the way he did things individually, nobody told him. I never heard anybody, including Laurel, direct him in anything. You didn’t have to tell Hardy what to do. He was a hell of a good actor.”

As far as work was concerned, Babe was disinterested in direct proportion to Stan’s obsessive concern with production detail. In effect, he clocked out at the end of a shoot, deferring to Stan’s judgment and decisions.

Babe was an outdoorsman. He loved golf and food, a day at the races and reasonably uncomplicated pleasure. He kept his counsel. When someone once asked him about his politics, he replied that no one, in effect, should be swayed by the opinions of celebrities, particularly when they were, as he put it, “two half-assed comics.” His easygoing manner masked a deep sense of privacy that he never relinquished.

The Growth of Their Style

The definitive Laurel & Hardy characters lurched into view through several 1927 movies. In one, the convict movie “The Second Hundred Years,” their unquestionable bond underscored their comical ineptitude, and in another, “Do Detectives Think?,” they found their costumes. (One of the movies they made in between is a completely uncharacteristic two-reeler called “Flying Elephants,” in which they wear caveman mufti and in the only time they lay eyes on each other, they’re at each other’s throats.)

In “Putting Pants on Philip,” there’s less of the manner and none of the look. Hardy plays an officious Rotarian-looking swell named Piedmont Mumblethunder, “The Best-Dressed Man in Upper Sandusky,” the film title tells us, who greets his nephew from Scotland, Philip (Laurel). The sartorial Mumblethunder’s affront at Philip’s kilts is further inflamed by the horde of curious and bemused Upper Sandusky onlookers who follow them everywhere, to Mumblethunder’s acute distraction (every emotion of Hardy’s was acute; he was the least ambiguous of actors). When he isn’t dealing with them, or the police, or a tailor to correct his nephew’s wayward (in his opinion) outfit, he’s trying to restrain Philip’s amorous advances toward a young woman (a characteristic that Laurel soon abandoned).

When at last Philip catches up with her in the street, he gallantly lays his kilt across a mud-puddle at the curb. “Just an old Scotch custom,” he says. She bounds over it. Hardy stops him with a hand and a haughty slap on the nose. “Just an old American custom,” he intones, before stepping out pridefully and plunging neck-deep into a mud-hole.

It would not be the last time Babe sank into a water hole after an attempt at besting Stan. Nor is his final expression of wounded inscrutability the last he will turn toward the camera--meaning us--in his silent bid for our understanding witness. Exasperated, peeved, indignant, resigned, incredulous--throughout the life of Laurel & Hardy, Babe found numerous uses for that direct, fruitless appeal. No one before or since has been able to use the camera that way as well.

Bridging the Decades

Aside from their talent, Laurel & Hardy benefited from their historic moment and the people who worked around them (though he was tough-minded and moralistic, Hal Roach’s hands-off working style led to his studio’s nickname, “The Lot of Fun”). Most silent-screen comedies drew their effect from manic pacing, sight gags, physical improbabilities that could only be concocted on the screen and stock character reactions to mountingly horrific situations.

As their technology improved through the early ‘30s, movies began to settle around the more literary and naturalistic conventions brought by theater types who came West. People began to take their time on screen talking things out. But Laurel & Hardy trundled into the decade like a raffish Italian circus with the full panoply of silent movie techniques still in tow. They kept their sense of antic pictorial value. Most of all, they continued the notion that mayhem’s megatonnage begins with human error and pulses steadily outward in the shocking collapse of props.

Stan knew, however, that while sight gags give us visceral jolt, it’s character that generates emotional appeal. He brought a voluminous stage experience to the movies, which included not only his storehouse of bits and business, but the conviction that a performer does, after all, play to an audience, even if it’s unseen. He knew an audience needs breathing room and he had a sympathetic director in Leo McCarey, who felt that slowing the tempo not only put people’s reaction times more in sync with what was going on in front of them, but that it was more in keeping with two characters who were a mental half-step behind.

Like all great performers, they made us hostage to their sense of time. How often do we see them react by not reacting at all, as in the scene from “Blockheads,” when Ollie’s car is pinched in its parking space by a flat-bed construction truck filled with sand. “Move that truck!” Ollie orders. Stan dutifully climbs into the cab, starts the truck, signals a left-hand turn, and fumbles with several levers before moving it up. Of course he’s inadvertently upended the cargo of sand on top of Ollie. Manfully he strides back and is jolted by what he sees: What once was a car and its fat, short-fused driver is now a hillock of sand with a derby perched on top.

It was a conscious technique. McCarey was once quoted as saying, “At that time (early ‘30s), comics had a tendency to do too much. With Laurel & Hardy, we introduced the opposite. We tried to direct them so that they showed nothing, expressed nothing--and the audience, waiting for the opposite, laughed because we remained serious.”

Their reaction time infected others as well. There was always a pause between the offense and the reply, which gave us a chance to savor the moment. And it didn’t only apply to the two of them. In “Two Tars,” a road-long fender-bender led to the reciprocal dismantling of automobiles down the line of a traffic jam. Stan & Ollie, and their challengers, would look each other in the eye for a hostile moment before proceeding to rip off a door, or a wheel, or all four wheels, in the progressive course of their automotive mayhem. The pause gave us the unreality. The carnage gave us our release from the tyranny of objects.

Their Film Legacy

Laurel & Hardy made more than 100 films together as stars. They helped make tolerable such outdated vehicles as “Fra Diavolo”--a “Zorro” bit of frippery that became a minor classic because of their appearance--”Babes in Toyland” and “The Bohemian Girl.” Almost anywhere along the line beginning in 1927, you could pick up on their unobtrusively masterful style and take pleasure in what they were up to next. (Their 1932 comedy short, “The Music Box,” won an Academy Award.)

In “Way Out West,” for example, all the elements of their relationship are elegantly played out from the beginning, which shows Ollie drawn pasha-like by Stan guiding a mule-cart along a Western road, until Ollie sinks into a pond (subsequent shots show them continuing on with Ollie’s clothes drying out on an impromptu ambulatory clothesline). They’re on a well-intended mission, as they often are, to deliver the deed to a gold mine to a young women whose father, who owned the mine, has died.

Mistaken identities ensue as an unscrupulous bar owner (James Finlayson, the boys’ perennial nemesis and a master of the slow burn) and his floozy wife (Sharon Lynne) get hold of the deed and then lose it back to them in the course of events, which include a charming saloon two-step song and dance by the boys, and a chaotic attempt to break into the upstairs Finlayson redoubt (which results in the mule flying through a second-story window, then plunging down the staircase like a wrecking ball).

The action guarantees, as usual, the progressive Carthaginian ruin of everything belonging to the malefactors, and a triumphant sauntering down the road in the sunshine of the redeemed, Stan, Ollie, the ingenue-heiress (Rosina Lawrence) and the intrepid mule. They sing “We’re Goin’ to Go on Down to Dixie,” their faces full of a radiant future--until Ollie sinks in the pond once again.

The Sad Decline

The ‘40s were unkind to Laurel & Hardy. Their work schedule became more sporadic as they left Roach and went with 20th Century Fox and MGM--two studios unconscionably indifferent and even hostile to the Laurel & Hardy personae, misconceiving them as “jerks,” “dopes” and “half-wits.” They had no say in what they did. They showed up for work, but in effect they were prepackaged and part of a larger, more ostensibly progressive formula that offered the American moviegoer the cinematic equivalent of Spam.

Too, they were getting older, and regardless of their charm it’s hard to see a duo who made their way so irrepressibly as “the boys” visibly age before our eyes. By the early ‘50s, the health of both of them began to decline, and a colossally wasteful and misguided French-Italian movie project called “Atoll K” (Also called “Utopia”) virtually wrecked them both. Stan suffered a small stroke, and recovered. Babe had a massive stroke, and didn’t. He died in 1957. Stan never worked again, and took up the gracious and companionable role of comedy elder statesman, receiving anyone who happened by in his Santa Monica home until he died in 1965.

The Boys as Heroes

If gags and optical technique had been all, Laurel & Hardy probably would have been lumped in with Larry Semon and all the other antic characters who dusted up the American movie screen in the earlier part of our century, only to be jammed piecemeal today between kidvid commercials in afternoon features, or as passing characters in academic retrospectives.

But aside from their almost ballet-like management of mayhem, they had endearing qualities that far transcended their blunt circumstances and the unforgiving people around them, the harpy wives, the schemers, the bullies, the flinty landlords, the glowering police, the arrogant and the officious. Both of them were indefatigably committed to the old idea of virtue, however quaint, and would go to any length to see it redeemed.

At bottom, to them, there was an unspoken sanctity about being together. For all of Ollie’s Poo-Bah airs, there was never any serious question of his abandoning Stan, even though Stan was the one person in the world who continuously, if inadvertently, demolished his pretenses. And to Stan, Ollie was the superior fool, but the leader. They were as asexual as kids, and as seemingly uninjurable. And no matter what happened, we never failed to see them in the light of their own innocence.

Laurel & Hardy came up shortly after World War I and took the world through its great Depression, not realizing what darlings they had become to audiences feeling themselves up against systemic collapse--Laurel & Hardy shared our atmosphere of poverty and dismay; their comic buoyancy was a cheer.

Stan told author John McAbe of his 1953 visit, with Babe and their wives, to Cobh, Ireland (part of a European tour), where the docks were teeming with fans:

“It’s strange, a strange thing. Our popularity has lasted so long. Our last good pictures were made in the ‘30s, and you’d think people would forget, but they don’t. The love and affection we found that day at Cobh was simply unbelievable. There were hundreds of boats blowing whistles, and mobs and mobs of people screaming at the docks. We just couldn’t understand what it was all about. And then something happened that I can never forget. All the church bells in Cobh started to ring out our theme song, and Babe looked at me, and we cried. Maybe people loved us and our pictures because we put so much love in them. I don’t know. I’ll never forget that day.”

Laurel & Hardy achieved that rare level of artistry where the very mention of their name evokes an image and a complex of emotions, in their case having wholly to do with pleasure. Out of our entertainment-saturated midst, they’ve risen to an emblematic immortality. Who could ask for anything more?