Review: Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations on Kit Parker Blu-ray

This set is a must-own for even casual fans of Laurel and Hardy.

Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive RestorationsAs the first great comedic duo of the sound era and the de facto bridge between the slapstick masters of silent cinema and the more verbose comedy teams like Abbott and Costello that followed them, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy developed a style and rapport all their own. While their madcap antics are steeped in the traditions of vaudeville, they established a comic rhythm that takes full advantage of the elasticity of cinematic time. In juxtaposing bursts of rapid-fire chaos, which inevitably unfolded around the duo, with extended and often delayed reaction shots and gags that are stretched out to (and sometimes past) their breaking points, Laurel and Hardy expanded and contracted time as a means of accentuating the uncanniness of both their verbal and visual ticks and the tempo of their comedic interplay.

While brief but explosive crescendos of violence and destruction stand out across their work, Lauren and Hardy’s comic personae typically flourished in the many long close-ups that populate their films. It’s in these shots where Laurel’s expressive eyebrows and his signature ambiguous smile conveyed the amiable naïveté and sensitivity that quickly came to define him. And it’s during Hardy’s perpetual fourth-wall-breaking glances and gestures that we get a sense of his perpetually escalating frustrations not only with Laurel’s bumbling, but also with the absurdity of the action that the audience bears witness to alongside him.

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Unlike the films of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, or Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy’s work rarely strives for much narrative or emotional complexity, but there’s an underlying warmth and camaraderie between the duo, even during their most contentious run-ins. Their emotions, however, are rarely the driving force of their films. Instead of pursuing various love interests, or in Keaton’s case, sometimes fleeing from them, the catalyst for physical action in their films is typically simple, often mundane tasks: delivering a land deed in Way Out West, doing a jigsaw puzzle in Me & My Gal, or putting an antenna on the roof in Hog Wild. And in many cases, the simpler the task, the better the results, as evidenced by perhaps their most beloved short film, The Music Box, which for nearly 30 minutes follows the boys doing nothing but attempting to lug a player piano up a long and intimidatingly steep set of stairs.

In the case of The Music Box, the gag’s protracted length is integral to its humor, as Laurel and Hardy’s journey up the stairs seems doomed to go on forever by the third time the piano rolls all the way back to the bottom of the hill. This strategy of drawing out gags is evident in many of their shorts, from Towed in the Hole, where the duo takes turns pouring water on each other, to Way Out West, where Laurel spends an inordinate amount of time trying to get an heirloom necklace off of Hardy, only to continually strip more clothes off of him after it slips down his shirt. Such routines are frequently a journey as much for them as they are for the audience, and to the point of tedium, but Laurel and Hardy are masters of persistence, so, after a while, these gags become even more hilarious simply because of their duration.

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Other times, Laurel and Hardy mine humor from their attempts to be helpful, but find that the more good they try to do, the more chaotic a situation becomes. Helpmates is a prime example of this tendency, with Laurel showing up to help his Hardy clean up before his wife returns home, only to systematically yet unintentionally prompt the destruction of the entire house. But despite things inevitably taking a turn toward the chaotic, and typically with Hardy soaked in water, Laurel and Hardy exude a tenderness and fortitude that never veers into mean-spiritedness. Instead, the duo, in their seeming inability to function as a symbiotic pair, despite their repeated efforts to do so, elicit both our laughter and heartfelt sympathy.

Image/Sound

All 17 shorts and two features included here received new 2K or 4K digital restorations from their original 35mm nitrate prints by Jeff Joseph/SabuCat in conjunction with the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Library of Congress. Given the disparate qualities of the original prints, the results are a bit uneven, with some films like Sons of the Desert and Brats appearing crude with their blown-out whites and overall lack of detail, particularly in characters’ faces in the medium-to-wide shots. There’s also a near-absence of grain in many of the shorts, giving them a slightly waxy, overly digitized look. On the other hand, there’s a nice uptick in sharpness, contrast, and detail whenever the blown-out whites aren’t present, which is fortunately much of the time. Audio is more consistent throughout, and while there’s a slight tininess to some of the dialogue, the sound effects are robust and suitably forward in the mix.

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Extras

What this four-disc Blu-ray set may lack in diversity of extras, it more than makes up with the inclusion of commentary tracks for every last film, even That’s That, a clip reel created primarily as a gift to Stan Laurel. Film scholars Randy Skretvedt and Richard W. Bann split the hosting duties and over the course of over eight hours cover the backgrounds of various supporting actors and the personal and professional history of Laurel and Hardy, even devoting ample time to breaking down numerous gags and the duo’s comic personae and performative ticks. Skretvedt appears again in three interviews from 1981, which he gave with three of Laurel and Hardy’s co-workers: Anita Garvin, Joe Rock, and Roy Seawright. Each touch on Laurel’s kindness, his ghost-directing nearly every film he appeared in with Hardy, and the joys of working on the Hal Roach lot. The set is rounded out with a very brief interview with Oliver Hardy from 1950 and a huge collection of rare photos, stills, posters, and scripts.

Overall

With an abundance of passionate, informative commentary tracks and solid, if uneven, transfers, this set is a must-own for even casual fans of Laurel and Hardy.

Score: 
 Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, Mae Busch, Dorothy Christy, Lucien Littlefield, Rosina Lawrence, James Finlayson, May Wallace  Director: James W. Horne, William A. Seiter, George Marshall, James Parrott, Lloyd French  Screenwriter: Frank Craven, H.M. Walker, Charley Rogers, Jack Jevne, Stan Laurel  Distributor: Kit Parker Films  Running Time: 511 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1927 - 1940  Release Date: June 30, 2020  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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