The most famous of the team’s silent films finds them traveling to the suburbs of Los Angeles trying, and failing, to sell Christmas trees.
Also worth a look from this same nascent period: Battle of the Century, a lost-then-found short featuring the pie fight to end all pie fights. Both sport alarmingly short crew cuts and at one point Stan actually has a good idea, but the chemistry is clearly in place as they play a pair of cellmates who break out of jail only to end up right back where they started. It took a few films to work out the kinks, but The Second Hundred Years finds the familiar Stan and Ollie characters starting to take shape. They’d both been in the film business for a while, and even appeared in one short together years before becoming a team in 1927. Hardy, a Georgia native known to his friends as “Babe,” had worked in vaudeville and came to Hollywood after making some films in Florida.
The English Laurel had been part of the same acting troupe that produced Charlie Chaplin, even serving as Chaplin’s understudy for a bit. Neither Stan Laurel nor Oliver Hardy was new to the entertainment business when producer Hal Roach teamed them up in 1927. Below, we’ve compiled a few greatest hits to get you started. But however you watch Laurel and Hardy, you’ll find a wealth of comedy that’s as funny today as it ever was. (And, please stay away from any colorized versions.) The best legitimate source remains the expansive (and expensive) ten-disc DVD set Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection, which collects almost all of the sound-era shorts and features that the duo shot for Hal Roach Studios between 19. Currently, you can stream some on Prime Video and many are on YouTube in copyright-skirting uploads of wildly variable quality.
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Laurel and Hardy’s films haven’t been TV staples in decades and the best of them didn’t arrive on DVD until 2011, as the format was waning in popularity. And even today, Laurel and Hardy remain instantly recognizable: the big guy with the tiny mustache and the little guy with the vacuous expression, both wearing bowler hats that could fit a little bit better.īut anyone leaving Stan & Ollie wanting to go back to the source material will have to do a little work. But even here, Laurel and Hardy need no introduction.
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The movie opportunities have dried up and TV has yet to make them inescapable via reruns of their old movies that played in constant rotation for the next couple of decades. The film mostly focuses on the duo during a low point of their fame as they tour 1950s England with a stage show. Then they keep it going, until the clerk, who never has to ask their names, says, “You just wait ‘til I tell my mom it’s you! We never get anybody famous staying here.” Dusting off an old routine, Stan bumbles his way through the lobby carrying way too many pieces of luggage while Ollie grows increasingly impatient. Reilly) decide to delight the clerk with a bit of business.
Photo: Ullstein Bild/Ullstein Bild via Getty ImagesĬhecking into a Newcastle hotel early in the new biopic Stan & Ollie, Stan Laurel (Steve Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (John C.
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