Not So Fine Messes: The 1940s Films of Laurel and Hardy

Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #25.

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One Saturday night in my adolescence, I had viewed Laurel and Hardy in their 1942 comedy vehicle, A-Haunting We Will Go. Even to my inexperienced eyes, something was off. Their movements were slower, their demeanour was a touch melancholic: had they actually aged more than the two years since the release of Saps at Sea? Regardless, I enjoyed the movie, without knowing that this one of the films made during their reviled 20^th Century Fox period. 

Nearly two decades earlier, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy began their career as a team during the silent era, at Hal Roach Studios. Roach had specialized in comedy shorts, with such greats as Charley Chase and Our Gang in his roster. Laurel and Hardy continued to make two-reelers into the sound era, and expanded into features. The formula of the bumbling, childlike Stan and the exasperated, finicky Ollie continued to delight audiences throughout the 1930s. The highlights from this decade include the Oscar-winning short, The Music Box, and the features, Sons of the Desert or Way Out West. 

At the end of the decade, however, Roach began to pursue other interests in cinema. He had shifted his focus to “streamliners” (movies that were longer than his typical two-reeler comedy shorts, but still not quite as long as features) in the interest of selling them for movie double-bills where the main feature was longer than usual. In fact, Laurel and Hardy’s final projects with Roach, A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea, were initially produced as streamliners, however the team was called back to film some more scenes to make them feature length, adding to the episodic nature of both movies. (This explains the age difference between Saps at Sea and A-Haunting We Will Go, as Saps was shot well before 1940, but still…)

In addition, Roach produced other feature-length movies such as 1937’s screwball classic Topper, the prestige 1939 film Of Mice and Men, and the 1940 fantasy, One Million B.C. During this time, he also sold the rights for Our Gang to MGM. The universal truth of about the new Our Gang shorts being inferior to the Roach period would parallel that of Stan and Ollie’s work of that decade, in comparison with their earlier years. Still, to say that their 1940s films are inferior is not however to discount their popularity during this decade. With six films for Fox, two for MGM, and constant stage performances in between movies, Laurel and Hardy were as crowd-pleasing as ever.

The conventional wisdom that all of their 1940s films are terrible largely stems from John McCabe’s 1975 book, Laurel and Hardy. Seldom do any of the Fox or MGM pictures receive more than one out of a possible four “bowler hat” ratings. Because McCabe’s write-ups for any of these later pictures are merely synopses that he could’ve scalped from any source, with no critical analyses whatsoever to support his low ratings, one wondered if he had even seen these films. It has since been revealed that these brief blurbs were influenced by Stan Laurel’s own unhappy recollections of that period to the author, and therefore McCabe did not see the worth of investigating these films on his own.

For the next few decades, Stan and Ollie’s 1940s films would continue to have a malignant reputation among their devout fans. This stigma was furthered by the inclusion of The Big Noise (1944) into the Harry Medved-Randy Dreyfuss book, The Fifty Worst Films of All Time. The Big Noise is far from being one of the worst movies ever made- it isn’t even Laurel and Hardy’s worst film: that (dis)honour belongs to Utopia (1952), a miserable European-lensed debacle that was plagued with production problems and Stan’s illness. Seeing Laurel’s frail appearance made this witless affair even more depressing. Utopia (also known as Atoll K) would be their final film, and a really sorry swan song for the greatest comedy team of the twentieth century.

In the past couple of decades, the Hal Roach films had been seldom revived for television (likely for copyright issues): only in 2011 were all of the Laurel and Hardy – Hal Roach sound pictures released on DVD. Perhaps their long absence afforded people to finally have another look at the Fox movies- anything to sate their appetite while we waited for the Roach pictures to emerge from whatever limbo was holding them up. A few years ago, all of the Fox movies were released on two DVD boxed sets, many featuring audio commentary by author Scott MacGillivray, whose book Laurel and Hardy: From the Forties Forward perhaps was the first serious re-appraisal of their later work. Subsequently, MGM released their two Laurel and Hardy films in a boxed set featuring other films that comedy teams made while moonlighting for the studio.

Indeed, Fox was not known for comedy films: musicals and crime pictures were their forte. Writers on the studio’s payroll had a hard time figuring out what to do with Laurel and Hardy. The comedy team’s tested and true formula of two overgrown clowns fumbling their way through society was lost on the 20^th Century Fox staff. (In A-Haunting We Will Go, the writers even botched Ollie’s familiar line, “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.”) Even if they had sympathetic writers, however, it could still be argued how well their familiar patterns would’ve worked for forties audiences. During World War II, there was a greater horror afoot than nagging wives; slapstick resulting in mass destruction would have mortified viewers who had to ration supplies during the war effort. Further adding insult to injury, Laurel and Hardy were sometimes guest stars in their own films. They would often appear as second bananas while romantic or dramatic subplots took centre stage, and their gags would often have little relation to the stories. 

As their relationship with 20^th Century Fox grew, they were eventually allowed more to improvise gags. But because their films were made under Sol Wurtzel’s “second feature” unit, these B-budgeted comedies were stringently edited for running time to fit in a double bill, which is why many of them appear to have choppy story continuity.

Even if they did get the chance to work with some comedy veterans before and behind the camera, it was clear that things weren’t like the good old days. (In fact, the comedy duo is seldom shown in close-up, to hide their advancing age.) If their remembrances of the 1940s films were unhappy ones, Stan and Ollie never gave anything less than professionalism for even the most middling of these efforts.

Recent viewings of Laurel and Hardy’s features from 1941 to 1945 reveal these works as hardly the travesties that they are commonly considered to be. However, they are not misunderstood comedy masterpieces, either. As is often the case, the truth is somewhere in the less exciting middle. Still, within this output there a couple of true gems, some fine entertainments, and a couple of interesting misfires. 

Part 2 of this article continues here.