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Movies Forum Index » Silent Movies Forum » New York Times: The Stan Laurel Collection, Vol. 2...
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| Bruce Calvert... |
 Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2008 3:43 am |
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/movies/homevideo/08dvds.html?_r=2&ref=movies&oref=slogin&oref=login
THE STAN LAUREL COLLECTION, VOLUME 2
In the many short films and features they made together from the late
1920s to the early ’50s, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy present such
fully developed characters and such an enduring portrait of friendship
that it’s hard to believe that Laurel had an existence independent of
his partner. But exist he did, and as the recently issued second
volume of “The Stan Laurel Collection” from Kino illustrates, it was
an extensive and varied existence.
Born in England in 1890, Laurel first came to America as a member of
Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, in which he worked as an understudy to the
company’s star, Charles Chaplin. Some of his earliest film roles, as
in the 1918 “Huns and Hyphens,” find him unapologetically imitating
that former colleague. When he goes to work for the producer Hal
Roach, in films like “Just Rambling Along” (1918) and “A Man About
Town” (1923), he trades Chaplin’s bowler and baggy pants for the straw
hat and white ducks of Harold Lloyd, Roach’s most popular star. And
the new volume includes several of Laurel’s parodies of the hit films
of the day, like “Mud and Sand” (1922), in which he appears, his hair
slicked back with shiny pomade, as the matinee idol Rhubarb Vaselino.
But then there are shorts, like the 1924 “Detained,” in which the
childlike character of the Laurel and Hardy years seems almost fully
formed: the wide-eyed expressions of wonder, the sudden eruptions of
tears and the eerily blank look that crosses his face when he’s bored
or distracted are all there, ready to coalesce. Just as it is
difficult to define the first true “Laurel and Hardy” film — the two
appeared together in several of Roach’s all-star comedy shorts before
they were perceived as a team — it is also hard to say when Stan
Laurel stepped out of the shadow of his influences and became the
Stanley we know and love. But to watch the process, as these 21 short
films allow us to do, carries its own fascination. (Kino
International, $29.95, not rated)
Bruce Calvert
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