STACK#127 May 2016

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the boys) are sailors who arrive in town on leave. Pandemonium ensues when each set of twins is mistaken for the other. The mistaken identities gag works throughout the 74-minute running time because the duos don't discover

Stan performs his lighted thumb routine in Way Out West.

The Laurel and Hardy appreciation society, which today has thousands of members worldwide and its own coat of arms

picture titled Atoll K, released in France in 1951, Laurel and Hardy's film career came to an end. After several triumphant tours of Britain with their music hall act, they finally called it a day and formally retired in 1954. Oliver Hardy died aged 65 in August 1957. In 1961, Stan Laurel, who never recovered from his dear friend's death, was awarded an honorary Oscar for his lifetime contribution to films. His one regret was that his friend Ollie was not alive to share the award. Stan died in 1965, aged 74. Through television and DVD, Laurel and Hardy's legacy of laughter lives on as each new generation discover and enjoy their timeless comedy routines. And no doubt, whatever the viewing medium will be in another hundred years, the childlike curiosity of Stan and the false pomposity of Ollie will still be generating laughter from their future audience. End note: The opening scene of the Laurel and Hardy 1927 silent short The Battle of the Century features Stan as a prize fighter and Ollie as his trainer- manager. In the front row of the boxing ring crowd, just to the right of Hardy, can be seen a slightly rotund, dark haired young man. His name was Louis Francis Cristillo and in 1927 he was a freelance film extra and stuntman who yearned to be a movie comedian. Ten years later he would link up with the best vaudeville straight man in the business, and together they would become known to moviegoers as the comedy duo- Abbot and Costello.

their contracts with Roach expired. As the new decade began, both Stan and Ollie found they owed serious back taxes to the US Government. Adding to their financial woes, their ex-wives (Stan was married five times and Ollie three times) were publicly claiming they had been left destitute and were now chasing them for huge amounts of alimony. Consequently, they did not renew their contracts with Roach but instead formed their own corporation, Laurel and Hardy Feature Productions, and signed a ten-picture deal with 20th Century Fox. Stan would later state that signing the Fox contract was the worst career decision he ever made. At the small independent Roach studios, Stan had always insisted that the L&H films were shot in sequence, which allowed him to seamlessly integrate the gags in line with the plot. However, at the vast Fox studios, every film was shot out of sequence to save production costs. And much to his annoyance, Stan was not allowed to contribute to the storyline or the dialogue. But much worse, just as MGM had tried to reinvent Buster Keaton (which destroyed his movie career), Fox attempted to reinvent Laurel and Hardy by discarding most of their trademarks. Their unique magical comedy routine was gradually stifled with each Fox picture they made, and although they were still able to raise plenty of laughs, their scenes were now no more than episodic asides to the main story, and the boys knew it. Subsequently in 1945, when Fox offered them a further five year extension to their contract, they both declined. Following a disastrous European motion

each others' presence until the final minutes of the film. In 1937 MGM released Laurel and Hardy's full length masterpiece, the comedy western Way Out West . Stan and Ollie have to locate the daughter of a deceased gold prospector and present her with her inheritance – the deeds to a gold mine. The superb mix of visual and verbal gags is truly masterful, inventive filmmaking. An example of this is when they cross a lake (actually situated on the Roach lot and named the Laurel and Hardy lake). Stan crosses it without incident but Ollie always manages to find the deepest part, leaving just his bowler hat floating on the surface. When the prospector's daughter asks what her father died of, a vacant looking Stan replies, "I think he died of a Tuesday, or was it of a Wednesday?". This and Stan and Ollie's dainty soft shoe shuffle to the Avalon Boys rendition of At the Ball, That's All are absolutely timeless cinematic moments. Between 1933 and 1939, Laurel and Hardy made 14 full length feature films and 12 shorts at the Roach studios, the last, Saps at Sea (1940) was completed just before

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