Laurel & Hardy The Silent Years (1929) │ Eureka Entertainment
Courtesy of Eureka Entertainment
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
You think you’ve seen every Laurel & Hardy short ever made and then those good people at Eureka Entertainment release a new package of delights which has you laughing afresh, all over again. In those days, movie stars really were prolific.
The latest release, Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years (1929), is a collection of nine short films, presented in high definition for the first time in the United Kingdom. As usual with The Masters of Cinema Series there is a ton of additional material from a range of doyens adding even more colour to what we are about to see – or have seen. There’s an accompanying booklet with notes on each film written by the comedian and silent comedy buff Paul Merton and from the silent cinema authority Chris Grosvenor. The two-disc Blu-Ray also includes boocoodles of commentary on each of the nine shorts, all released in 1929, a new documentary from David Cairns and Fiona Watson and alternate music scores for the different films, by the likes of Robert Israel, Neil Brand, Andreas Benz, Maud Nelissen and Gaylord Carter – and more. But above all are the nine shorts themselves with the inimitable Stan & Ollie doing their stuff.
While they are more or less recycling their old comedic tics, they are enormously accomplished physical comedians, exhibited to enormous effect on the first short called Liberty, directed by none other than Leo McCarey. Here, we first see them running for their lives in the standard-issue striped uniforms of escaping convicts, before being rescued by a car parked in the woods, in which they shed their prison clothes and don their more recognisable suits, although they’ve got them mixed up. For those who don’t know what Laurel & Hardy look like, I should explain than Stan Laurel is the small and wiry one and Oliver Hardy is the considerably larger gentleman, so it’s a very much a case of the wrong trousers, which becomes a major issue when they end up on the top of a partly-constructed skyscraper soaring vertiginously over downtown Los Angeles. Immediately one is reminded of the classic Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last made six years earlier, in which the silent comedian finds himself suspended above the very same streets, but I was surprised how adept and fearless Laurel & Hardy were in similar straits – not a film for the acrophobic. As it happens, as I was to learn, there were a whole string of silent shorts, dubbed collectively ‘High & Dizzy’, in which numerous stars found themselves dangling over the streets of LA.
And I have to say what I love about these films is how they capture the everyday life of a period long gone, when shop fronts advertise ‘drug sundries’ and ‘dry goods’ – whatever they were. Actually, I did ask AI what dry goods are and it told me that they’re textiles and clothing. So, even if slapstick is not your bag, there is enough nostalgia here to sate the palate of anyone blessed with a modicum of inquisitiveness.
Eureka Entertainment’s release of Laurel and Hardy : The Silent Years (1929) is now available on Blu-ray
EUREKA ENTERTAINMENT is the leading independent distributor of classic silent/early films in the UK. In 2004, Eureka! established the award winning Masters of Cinema Series, a specially curated director-led Blu-ray and DVD collection of classic and world cinema using the finest available materials for home viewing. In 2014, Eureka! established Eureka! Classics intended to highlight a broader selection of classic and cult cinema, and in 2017, Eureka! established Montage Pictures, a label celebrating ground-breaking and thought-provoking world cinema from new and upcoming directors.
