While there is no serious dispute that Laurel and Hardy are the greatest comedy team in film, and that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are two of the finest film comedians, they are rarely listed among the pantheon of great film-makers. I believe this has to do with formal film criticism's orientation toward the feature form, and with Stan Laurel's preference for the short film. (This is not unique to film; in music Grieg and Bartok are denigrated as "talented miniaturists" in contrast to the symphonists such as Beethoven, Brahms and Mahler. And what short story writer is revered as much as a novelist?)

Stan Laurel frankly admitted that he was more comfortable making short subjects. Structuring a feature film continually gave the team trouble. Sometimes, as in Pardon Us, Blockheads or Saps At Sea, they didn't even try, and simply produced a string of short subjects loosely stitched together and called a feature.

Some critics have gone so far as to say that their characters were not suited to long-form stories; that they lacked the spark or drive to keep a story going. Evidently, this was the belief of the 20th-Century Fox and MGM writers who made Laurel and Hardy guest stars in their own films and let the gangsters, Nazis and young love interests carry the plotline. Gradually, the myth took hold that, as basically passive characters, Stan and Ollie could not propel a long form narrative, and had to be "helped" or dispense with long form entirely.

This is errant nonsense. Historically, the comic epic (which includes works such as Don Quixote, The Pickwick Papers, Candide and Gulliver's Travels) is often built on characters who are passive, (apparently) dimwitted, slow-moving, unambitious, all the sorts of characteristics critics claim will torpedo story development. The greatest literary comic epics of the century, The Good Soldier Schweick and A Confederacy Of Dunces are built on characters who are trying to avoid contact with society's demands. Laurel and Hardy, on the other hand, accept social structure and try to fit into it. There are many narrative devices available to them which they could have adopted to create longform stories, but which, due excessive modesty about their talents, caution or distaste for certain forms, they never utilized.

The principal story device Laurel and Hardy never bothered with is the farce device of mistaken identity. Their only significant use of this time-honored structure is in Our Relations, but they barely scratch the surface of the possibilities, compared to the works of Plautus or Shakespeare.

Another area rife with possibilities for Stan and Ollie is satire. Even the misfire Atoll K suggests wonderful untapped possibilities. The Boys were rarely given positions of responsibility with all the potential for error. And while it is a given that Laurel and Hardy will end each film with nothing but each other, they rarely have much to lose to begin with. How much more comedy might have resulted if the descent was from a greater height?

Moreover, Ollie clearly desires social status and respectability; his comic flaw (besides the basic incapacity to realize his dreams) is that he wants to bring Stan along with him. This is clearly an engine strong enough to drive a feature-length story, along the lines of Moliere's Would-Be Gentleman.

So here's my fantasy that Stan Laurel found a way to work with other comic forms, and perhaps other comic filmmakers so as to extend the boundaries of Laurel & Hardy's comic universe and conquer their recurrent difficulties with larger narrative structures.

I'm going to take it easy to begin with.

The last 10 or 15 minutes of A Chump At Oxford hint at a much richer and funnier film than the 30 minutes or so of horseplay that precede them. Imagine that Stan kept finding new and different ways to conk his noggin to switch back and forth between Lord Paddington and Stan. Imagine Lord Paddington being consulted on the proper strategy for Oxford to triumph in cricket over Cambridge. (Picture Stan with cricket bat in hand??) Or worse still, imagine Lord Paddington being consulted on Britain's wartime strategy—he is clearly an all-purpose genius—delivering half of his ideas, and leaving it to Stan to work out the other half. Imagine Babe getting continually whipsawed in this Jekyll & Hyde-like alternation of affection and contempt from Stan/Paddington. And who is Lord Paddington's family? Are they all half-genius, half-idiot? This could have been Stan's Nutty Professor only much, much better.

Peter Seller's characterization in Being There was explicitly based on Stan Laurel. While I bow to no one in my admiration of Mr. Sellers (tell me, how many episodes of the Goon Show do you have, hmmm?), picture Stan as Chance The Gardener, this time accompanied by Babe, at first indignant, then perplexed, then worshipful, then finally perhaps even jealous at the attention given this numbskull, in comparison with his, Babe's, own phenomenal mental acuity (he thinks). Picture all America rapt at each of Stan's nonsensical utterings. Picture the frenzy of nut-purchasing as everyone becames eager to consume the brainfood that fuels Stanley Chance. And how much better would that wonderful final fade-out be, as Stan walks across the water, not self-consciously like Sellers, but brilliantly oblivious. Babe fumes on shore, then decides to try it himself, and get out onto the pond just far enough to fall into one of those mysterious 8-foot water holes that Babe always found.

It always astounded me that Stan and Ollie could obtain craft and blue-collar jobs where incompetence can be immediately spotted and rooted out. In the world of management, however, you can go on for years and years as an incompetent nincompoop and rise to the top of the organization and stay there for many years (I'd name names, but there are libel laws). This film was the product of Stan's brilliant collaboration with Preston Sturges undertaken when he moved Laurel and Hardy Feature Productions to United Artists, under the financial protection of Stan's old roommate, Charlie Chaplin.

It all begins when Stan wins an advertising slogan contest. ("Fortescue's Nuts are Some Nuts!") He is invited to visit the advertising agency and takes Babe. Maybe the prize involves a job, perhaps he is mistaken for an English ad genius who is expected to visit. In any case, he and Babe rise in the company. (Much office machinery business—imagine the Boys encountering electric pencil sharpeners, steno machines, dictation machines, intercoms and other appurtenances of 30's and 40's office life.) Eventually, Babe comes up with a contest/promotion idea that whips the nation into a frenzy, then fouls up the critical detail (something like the Treasure Hunt in How To Succeed In Business the ends up having the corporate headquarters torn to bits) that wipes out the company. Once again, Stan and Babe are back to nothing, and just as happy, or happier.

The style of the film is a little unnerving as Sturges replaces Jimmy Finlayson and Charles Hall with Franklin Pangborn and William Demarest, and some of the cutting is faster than Stan's regular tempo, but a compromise is worked out; and the slick 40's style so offensive in the Fox films is here put in the service of satire.

Nearly everyone who has written about Our Relations has remarked that the two sets of twins are pretty much the same. Stung by this criticism, Stan took the idea suggested by the end of Thicker Than Water and extended it to feature length, using The Twin Manaechmi of Plautus as his basis. As in Plautus, the two pair are master and servant, but unlike Plautus, each set is reversed. While the American Stan and Ollie are in their familiar relationship, the British Stan dominates and blusters over the meek (and secretly more intelligent) British Ollie. They are all on board a transatlantic steamer; with the Americans on their honeymoons and the Brits trying to patch together rocky, failing marriages (due to excessive attendance at conventions, etc.) There are many complications with the wives, involving various romantic rendezvouses, etc. Charlie Hall as an obnoxious purser trying to collect a debt from one of the Stans and getting into a contretemps with the wrong pair; and Finlayson as the terminally confused and frustrated captain add to the fun.

Stan and Babe received a lot of criticism when they accepted an invitation from the Berliner Ensemble in 1947 to make a film written and directed by Bertolt Brecht. They later claimed to know nothing about his politics, and in fact the finished film contains no discernible Communist propaganda. As Stan said, "The funny thing about Brecht is that he kept wanting to put more business and more songs in the picture. Sturges and that Hollywood crowd wanted story, story, story, but with Brecht, I was the one who had to push to get some story into it".

The resulting film was the loosest adaptation of the three Brecht made of the novel The Good Soldier Schweick. Stan and Brecht quickly agreed to set the film in no particular time in no particular country. In it, Stan and Babe are rag-and-scrap-metal men roaming across a strange mid-Europa countryside when they are conscripted into a war they were not aware was going on. The story, such as there is, comes from Babe's conclusion that they need to "talk to the man in charge and find out what's going on." The hierarchy of the military and the government is revealed like an onion with no center. One of the comic highlights comes when the Boys discover the secret bunker of Our Beloved Leader. Mysterious panels open and close at odd, unpredictable times, and the Boys spend almost 7 minutes just trying to pass through these peculiar portals. When they get inside they find a microphone covered in cobwebs next to a sign reading "Be Right Back." Stan starts to use the mike as a nutcracker when Babe snatches it away from him and first speaks into it to test it, then, hearing nothing, starts to sing. In a surrealistic moment which could be attributable either to Stan or Brecht, soldiers and civilians who hear the music over the public address system are entranced with the song, throw down their arms and begin dancing. Meanwhile, Stan and Ollie are discovered, accused of killing Our Leader and sentenced to hang by their thumbs. Fade out, fade in to the Boys by the side of the road. Babe sums up their misfortunes, concluding with, "And what have we got to show for it?" With that, a car drives by and Stan and Ollie, sitting on a fence, put out their 6-foot-long thumbs to hitch a ride.

Directed by Jacques Tati, this film is one of the most typical Laurel & Hardy films, yet one of the strangest at the same time. Building on an idea by Stan, Tati wrote a loose scenario for Stan and Ollie as plumbing and conduit installers for an enormous modern office-and-residential complex being built just outside of Paris. This gives the boys a chance to indulge in some familiar wrench-hammer-and-pipe type humor, combined with encounters with strange machinery and some very peculiar individuals who seem to be lost in the underground labyrinth under the enormous Complex. Tati amplifies Stan's mild penchant for running gags and white magic, with the return of Bobby Ray's character from Tit For Tat, this time removing pipe, I-beams and other structural elements of the Complex under the Boys' perplexed eyes. In typical Tati fashion, the film is held together not with plot, but with a thematic continuity. In the end, much to everyone's surprise, after the ribbon-cutting ceremony, the plumbing works perfectly inside the Complex. However, Stan and Babe have been closing off pipes and conduits throughout the underground structure, and the built-up pressure causes the National Assembly building in the center of Paris to blow up, as Stan and Ollie, in a brief echo of Buster Keaton, run off into a fade-out pursued by thousands of gendarmes.

Laurel and Hardy also made a foray into Italian neo-realism in this little-known predecessor to Big Deal On Madonna Street. At the end of World War II, Stan and Ollie have mustered out and decided to stay in Italy to live with Ollie's Italian relatives. (Lengthy musical interlude here.) A con man convinces Babe he is descended from Italian royalty, and the evidence is hidden in a nearby apartment. A gang is assembled with some interludes for excursions into Italian daily life. Stan's game of bocci has to be seen to be believed. The final 35 minutes is an entire pantomime sequence, parodying Rififi and many other heist films as the Boys attempt to break into the apartment in question. As they are about to pass through the final barrier to their goal, Stan tells Babe, "You know something? I don't think this is the right apartment." Babe responds indignantly, "What do you mean, not the right apartment? Of course it's the right apartment? Are you saying I don't know what I'm doing?" With that, Babe swings a sledge, collapses the wall and sends the building and its occupants sliding into a Venetian canal.

Stan precipitates nearly every major phenomenon in the mid-20th century, for good or ill. Just think about it.

Sporadically during the late 30's, Stan was working on a Devil's Island swashbuckling project which never seemed to jell—until now! Not only was this a chance to dabble in the kind of Errol Flynn-Tyrone Power parodies that Danny Kaye and Bob Hope had engaged in, but this was Babe's chance to play a dual role, harking back to his work as a heavy in his pre-L&H days. At the start of the film, Stan is returning to the island prison to rescue Ollie, who unbeknownst to him, has been released and set adrift to make his way to the mainland. Stan instead finds Jean MaFoote, the vicious and notorious pirate, and an exact double for Ollie (natch). Stan sails off with MaFoote, who puzzles Stan with is cruel and bullying behavior. Meanwhile, Ollie lands on a nearby island and is mistaken for MaFoote by the terrified islanders. As they cower from him more and more, he becomes more and more demanding and bullying. On the boat, MaFoote is afflicted with toothache, and due to Stan's tender ministrations, 'evolves' into Ollie. Stan and MaFoote get caught in a storm, and their boat washes up on the island that Ollie has been terrorizing. There are many mistakes and complications, which are increased when it is learned that a famous detective is on his way to catch MaFoote. The final blackout reveals the great detective to be none other than Lord Paddington!

Set in Edwardian England, this is a haphazard revue of a film starring the great stars of English variety that Stan knew and loved, playing their predecessors of a generation before. Stan and Ollie, hired to clean up the theatre, get swept up into the fun and develop a popular song and dance act based on their actual cleaning-up routine. All right, this one hasn't got any kind of a plot or structure, but don't you wish the Boys had done one like this?

I hope this has stimulated some thought in contravention of the accepted wisdom that Laurel and Hardy were not suited to features. Yes, they achieved an ideal equilibrium in short subjects. While it is true that comedies increase exponentially in difficulty as they increase in length, when they work, there is much richer payoff than in the short subject. And perhaps if they had made a more convincing case for themselves in the feature form, they would be more readily admitted into the pantheon of comic filmmakers.

Copyright © Kerr Lockhart, 2000. All Rights Reserved