Pasquale Ventura wrote:
For myself, I never had an issue with these comedies, I grew up watching regular broadcasts of the Fox features (their shorts too) throughout the 1960's where I fell in love with Laurel and Hardy. Most of my
There isn't a Laurel and Hardy comedy that isn't enjoyable. Got to admit a fondness to AIR RAID WARDENS. It's a breezy short feature, not even over an hour. THE BIG NOISE, THE DANCING MASTERS and THE BULLFIGHTERS arechildhood memories watching Laurel and Hardy are from these later features years before reading books on the team criticizing them, which bewildered me at the time. Never understood the naysayers "oh they are bad, don't watch cuz' Stan and Ollie are too old" Forming opinions from books before ever watching the movie is really nonsense. Please! Like you say Robert, where did this rule comedians are finished when they turn 50. Is this written in a book as well? Actually we are several years beyond that age now.
three solid features. GREAT GUNS and A HAUNTING WE WILL GO, NOTHING BUT TROUBLE aren't bad either, with HAUNTING and TROUBLE a bit more interesting. In NOTHING BUT TROUBLE their scenes with Mary Boland are excellent. She works so well with Laurel and Hardy. Hell, I enjoy watching them all
So glad I can enjoy Langdon, Keaton sound comedies, they are well crafted comedies containing many clever bits of comic business and gags.
Too many comedy fans limit themselves to just SONS OF THE DESERT, THE MUSIC BOX, WAY OUT WEST, THE GENERAL and THE STRONG MAN. They are not comedy fans. Poor fellows don't know the wealth of comedy material they are missing in celebrating all these comedians entire career of work.
More for us to enjoy.
Pasquale Ventura
Absolutely Pasquale! (and it's Richard, BTW)
I was first introduced to Buster Keaton, Bert Lahr, Groucho Marx, George Burns, Jack Benny, many others when they were in their elder years and still working on television, and found them funny and didn't think of their age as being any issue or hindrance to whether I laughed at them or not (same with Ben Blue, he was just as unfunny old as he was when he was young). I wasn't concerned with whether they had total control of whatever they were performing, were performing a bit they had done better in 1932, or chalking up a list of their films in the order of quality, I was too busy laughing.
As I mentioned over at Greenbriar, the first Laurel and Hardy film I ever saw was GREAT GUNS, and what I found there were two funny men there I wanted to see more of, and what I found just kept getting better and better.
In a World these days where there are film buffs who can't watch musicals because they're "too happy", and what passes for comedy in modern moviemaking depresses me, ANY laughs engendered by these greats are precious, and putting blinders on to be able to watch ONLY the prescribed and blessed by the historian/critics canon of classics just limits one from too damn many laughs. Heck, you cut Harry Langdon's filmography by more than half by denying "post-Capra", and several of my favorite Langdon films are talkies.
And for the analytical film historian in me, I find it fascinating watching a major comedy talent being forced to work in less than perfect circumstances, this is how you discover what their real talents are for making things work when they are thrown curves they wouldn't have thrown themselves. I find JITTERBUGS so interesting for this reason for it gives us one of those rare opportunities to see Stan and Babe playing characters apart from their norm, and they rise to it wonderfully, so what if it's not THE MUSIC BOX, they did THE MUSIC BOX, I can watch that too.
When you are comedy fans at the silent comedy mafia level, any time you can spend with these comics is quality time, do we abandon our real-life friends when they get "too old?" Perhaps much of American Society does do this to our elderly, and we pay dearly for that in losing an awful lot of experience and wisdom (well, at least if we assume that much of American Society these days actually manages to learn something as they age, sometimes I'm not so sure). The only advice I can give anyone watching vintage film is to watch everything, believe very little you read about film, and expect nothing more out of what you watch than an evening's entertainment, then you can get as close to the original moviegoing experience (especially if you're in an audience) as you can get, and you enjoy a lot more movies.
RICHARD M ROBERTS