Film Review: “Stan & Ollie”
Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes
97 MIN.
CREW: Director: Jon S. Baird. Screenplay: Jeff Pope. Camera (color): Laurie Rose. Editors: Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, Billy Sneddon. Music: Rolfe Kent.
WITH: John C. Reilly, Steve Coogan, Shirley Henderson, Nina Arianda, Rufus Jones, Danny Huston.
PRODUCTION: (U.K.) A Sony Pictures Classics (in U.S.)/Entertainment One (in U.K.) release of a BBC Films, Entertainment One presentation of a Sonesta Films, Fable Pictures production in association with Entertainment One Features, Baby Cow Films. (International sales: Sierra/Affinity, Los Angeles.)
Producer: Faye Ward. Executive producers: Xavier Marchand, Kate Fasulo, Joe Oppenheimer, Nichola Martin, Jeff Pope, Eugenio Perez, Gabrielle Tana, Christine Langan. Co-producer: Jim Spencer.
I can't claim to be a film buff, still less an expert. I think the last time I volunteered any money to go and watch a film at a picture house – or whatever they are called - would have been some time around 1980 to see Elvis Presley in “That's the Way It Is” and “Viva Las Vegas.” I did once have a nice film collection on video, though, bought in the shops or taped from television. And I must have some three dozen DVD's now. If I see a good film, I tend to stick with it and return to it as an old friend. I watch the same films over and again. I watched “Amelie” again at Christmas, a film that never fails to lift my spirits.
So it's a big deal to say that I did choose to volunteer some money to go and see “Stan and Ollie” at Cineworld. I knew from the first time I saw Laurel and Hardy all those days ago that they were my friends. I knew them as hopeless clowns who, well-intentioned as they were, would never let me down. They had me laughing and smiling way back when, and have continued to keep me laughing and smiling through thin and thinner ever since. They remain that pair of bumbling innocents I knew all those years ago, too sweet to survive in a world that is all-too often ugly and brutal. But, somehow, they always seemed to struggle through and survive, if nearly always by accident and very rarely, if ever, by design. Ever optimistic, ever hopeful, they managed to keep making it through the the calamities and disasters of malicious fortune – a lot of which was of their own making, admittedly – to carry on smiling. That inextinguishable crystal spirit they always possessed is still shining.
So I decided to go and watch this film, to see some old friends. And as a result found a new film that I could call a friend.
I got there early, 2-25pm, for a 3-00pm start. I had thought there would be crowds of people clamouring to get in. There was an elderly couple sat at the side. I think there must have been about 6-8 people at most in the theatre. In the film, a great deal is made of the fact that Laurel and Hardy, as ageing giants of comedy, had been reduced in later life to playing half-empty theatres. The one I was in was even emptier. Which seemed a shame. Although I read the film is topping the box office. Good. It deserves to.
In their films, Laurel and Hardy played loveable losers who were forever struggling against adversity, never “winning” at life, not when it came to money, possession, and status, yet, in love, joy, happiness, and friendship, they held the true “victory” of real wealth in their heart and soul. Given their popularity the world over, they ought to have earned millions. They didn't. They never had control over their work like Chaplin. They made money for others. And then fell on hard times. They were therefore compelled to team up again to embark on a tour of small theatres in the UK. By this time Oliver Hardy had serious health issues, and in the film is shown suffering a mild heart attack, forcing an abrupt end to the tour. Losers on screen, losers in real life, then. Which, to me, having spent years writing away for free, making next to no money to fall back on, and wrecking my own health as a result of endless hours sat down typing, makes the pair all the more endearing. Losers as the true “winners” at life. Winners and losers, how I hate these categories! Laurel and Hardy expose them as the pathetic frauds they are, and more fool anyone who uses them as standards by which to evaluate life.
Because Laurel and Hardy and all they stand for endures. That's the point I took from the film. They went out at the end singing and dancing. Which is all you can ask for, really.
The film does Stan and Ollie full justice with an affectionate portrait of their final comic collaboration.
Stan Laurel, a Lancashire man, from the north of England, my neck of the woods, was not given to romanticize the art of making comedy. He was the workaholic writer and crafter of routines who needed to know the mechanics of comedy thoroughly. He didn't romanticize the end or purpose, either: “You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.” He learned, and continued to hone the techniques, to such an extent that you don't see the mechanics, only the comic personae. It is hard to believe that the Stan and Ollie on screen could ever be different from the Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy off screen. The ebullience of a Laurel and Hardy routine give all the impression of a joint mugging for laughter and applause, good fun, but perfecting these routines was work made to look like like play through sheer craft and hard graft. “Stan and Ollie” is less about the comedy that we all know and love than about the physical and emotional toll that those years of hard labour exacted upon the merry makers. Physically, both are in poor health, Ollie more than Stan. They are in financially straitened circumstances, too, despite the immense popularity of their films. And their partnership is in doubt, raising questions of the nature of their friendship – was it ever real, or merely an allegiance to an act?
There isn't, in truth, much of a story to the film. Attenborough's “Chaplin” gave us Charlie Chaplin from boy to old man. I liked the film. But it did so go on and on. I speed through to the bits I like when I watch it now. It made it clear to those who didn't know Chaplin who he was and why he mattered. But it did risk boring us rigid along the way. Too much, too long, too many dramas and setpieces. “Stan and Ollie” goes in the other direction. It presumes that the audience knows who Laurel and Hardy are, which is a big presumption since this last generation or two have been the first to grow up without Laurel and Hardy being regularly on screen, as they once were. In the 1970s and 1980s they were never off. But now the new generation sees black and white as old and therefore rubbish. It's their loss.
The film has a slight story concerning an issue of betrayal when Oliver Hardy went and did a film without Stan. Laurel and Hardy always had individual contracts, which were up for renewal at different times, and so could never negotiate for better terms as the double act “Laurel and Hardy.”
Now for the story, the film Zenobia from 1939, which Ollie made without Stan, and which Stan considered a betrayal, and the reason why, all these years on, they are having to play small theatres. In their predicament, the resentment rises to the surface. “I loved us,” Stan claims. “But you never loved me,” replies Ollie. Stan, the brains and the workaholic, loves the double act, Ollie sees real persons and real friends.
That's the story to give the film drama. Is it true? Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were professionals, and a pro is a pro, work is work, and a pro takes it wherever he can get it. I wouldn't get bogged down on the truth or otherwise of the facts that go into a film. A good film comprises much more than facts that are accurate; the most meaningful facts are those that are true to life. The strength of the film is not its story, slight as it is, but its poignancy. Fans of Laurel and Hardy always identified them as friends, friends with each other, friends to us, the fans. Is that friendship real or fantasy? Stick with the film to the end, and you'll see that the answer is utterly affirmative, redeeming every fantasy we have ever entertained in entering the world of Laurel and Hardy armed with nothing more than a light heart and a willingness to smile at the simplest of things. Yes, on paper, and as a abstract proposition, it's undemanding. But try living it. Life is simple; the hard part is living it simple.
So there's the story: Stan feels betrayed by Ollie, and both never received the money their work, talent and success deserved. Hence they are reduced in their later years of poor health to a low-rent music hall tour of the U.K. and Ireland in 1953. As if to emphasize the injustice and indignity, the Bernard Delfont character is introduced to hammer home that Norman Wisdom is now the big star that the public are going to see in droves. Wisdom is packing out the big theatres whilst Laurel and Hardy are playing to half empty small theatres. The apprentice has taken the place of the masters. Losers on screen, losers in real life. We can empathize with them on screen as the comic double-act in film, we can empathize with them in their real lives. Just folk like us.
John C Reilly, who plays Hardy, said: "It was naturally a very reflective time for them - they were looking back on their lives together."
So we get a film of reflection, with Laurel and Hardy reflecting upon their relationship over the years, seeing what, really, it amounts to in the present. And we join them in reflecting upon our own lives, having known them from youthful introductions care of the TV.
The film is not edgy or cutting though. Instead, it is comfortable in the knowledge that Laurel and Hardy were, and remain, giants of comedy. There thus follows a gently elegiac portrayal of the pair’s swansong, a coming to terms with who they are and what they have achieved. It all comes to a natural end. With no need to look back in anger at the indignity and injustice of it all. They were well loved, and knew it, despite this final reckoning with fading relevance and diminished audience appeal. Time is swift, and catches up with all of us, even those two bumbling innocents who had seemingly perfected the knack of surviving adversity with a smile on their faces. True, they never seemed to learn from experience, but that's another way of saying they were never hardened nor embittered by circumstances.
I'd never heard of John C. Reilly before. As I say, I'm not much of a film buff. I'm not too fussy, I hope, but I can't stand cynicism, violence, bad language, guns, cars, death, ugliness, perversion, cruelty, cops and robbers, spies, terror … That probably doesn't leave much left when it comes to modern cinema. Or old, probably. I know what I like. And I can say that Reilly's performance as the ailing Ollie is beautifully subtle, in turns droll and anguished. I do, of course, know Manchester's very own Steve Coogan and have enjoyed his work for many years. His performance here reminded me in many ways of Peter Sellers in “Being There,” itself modelled on Stan Laurel. Stan's silly smile isn't seen much at all. It is a remarkably observed performance. How nice to see an old favourite come so good on the big screen.
The film begins in 1937, with Laurel and Hardy at the top in Hollywood. They have the fame, but not the fortune. They are hugely popular, but underpaid relative to “Charlie [Chaplin], Buster [Keaton] and Harold [Lloyd]” who “own their own pictures.”
The film opens by tracking Laurel and Hardy as they make their way from their dressing room through the studio backlot, saying hello to those they meet on their way, conducting a conversation, having an angry, contract-related, exchange with producer Hal Roach, before taking the stage to perform the daintily choreographed comic dance number “Commence to Dancing” for “Way Out West.”
Stan is complaining to Ollie about how little they are paid in comparison to other screen comedians such as Charlie Chaplin. The double act “Laurel and Hardy” is one of Hollywood's biggest draws, pulling in vast crowds, but without the pay packet to match. Stan argues with Hal Roach over their contract, Ollie demurs. They then perform the deftly danced routine for “Way Out West.”
Their contracts are out of sync, meaning they have to negotiate renewals as individuals, not as a double-act. Stan threatens to leave his co-producer Hal Roach, Roach calls his bluff, exit Stan to Fox, thinking Ollie would follow. He didn't. Instead, Ollie went to work on films without Stan. Hence the story of betrayal at the heart of the film.
The year is 1937 and Laurel and Hardy are at the height of their fame. Just people, ordinary folk, going to work, and that work involves magic. The transformation is magical, there's no other word with which to describe it. Laurel and Hardy switch on their unique brand of sweet silliness with the flick of the wrist. It's the magic the audiences see, and love, and remember. It's an escape from real life for the audiences. That's why I'm here, for that little escape from the stupidities of real life. To Laurel and Hardy it is work, and there is no escape from real life for them. And that's really what this film is about – the possibilities of finding magic in the real, and what real magic beyond fame and fortune is all about. Laurel and Hardy found the fame, of course. But not the fortune.
The film then moves on sixteen years to 1953, with both wealth and, in the case of Ollie's dodgy knees and weakened heart, health failing. The need to weigh the merits of one against the other is a constant concern. I can certainly sympathize, having worked myself to a standstill, for next to no financial reward, the very opposite, in fact. I found myself empathizing with this film on a number of levels. I seem to be out of words, out of time, and, if I fail to heed the warnings, out of health.
Laurel and Hardy are booked for a tour of small theatres in the UK and Ireland. Stan is greyer, Ollie is heavier, but they are still young at heart. Cue comedy routine with the bell.
Stan, comic brain, writer, and workaholic, knows the true worth of Laurel and Hardy, and is resentful of a situation in which Oscar-winning comedians are having to play half-empty provincial theatres at the end of their careers. Ollie, a comedy actor, is more sanguine, despite ill-health.
The ostensible purpose of the tour is to garner support for a new movie, a Robin Hood spoof entitled “Rob 'Em Good,” which Stan is setting up with a British producer. As the tour proceeds, Stan finds the elusive financial backer of the film, Mr Miffin, elusive, until he tries to track him down at his office. He's not in. And there will be no finance and no film. No one wants to watch Laurel and Hardy films any more. So there it is, Laurel and Hardy's days are done, but Stan cannot break the news to Ollie, so carries on the pretence of the film to come on the back of the increasingly tired tour.
So here they are in rainy old northern England in 1953. The sunshine days of Hollywood are well behind them. They are welcomed to a Newcastle boarding house by theatrical impresario Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones), but they have to check themselves in as Delfont makes it clear he has to go and see the comedian of the day, Norman Wisdom, in ten minutes. Any pretensions that Laurel and Hardy would be treated as big stars are shattered immediately. Stan stumbles in, falling over his cases as he goes. Screen life and real life intermingle. Later on, they watch as a heavy case falls all the way down the steps they have just struggled up. “Do we really need that case?” asks Ollie. We loved them as loveable losers on screen, people like the rest of us, whose ambitions are forever running ahead of their abilities, getting them into predictable trouble. And here they are in real life, up against it, like the rest of us.
Still, that's the theatre life. My mother worked at St Helens Theatre Royal. We saw all the acts here, singers, bands, comedians, you name it. Sometimes full, often not. That's the precarious nature of the business, and the performers would have it no other way. I've seen big stars, has-beens, never-wasers and never-would-bes nor could-bes play to half-empty houses, and nevertheless perform as if they were at the London Palladium and the place was packed to the rafters. You are not playing to numbers, you are playing to people, and each person there is a packed audience in himself or herself. The best know it, the worst feel it. I've seen acts flee the stage in tears as a result of being heckled and jeered. I've seen them cheered to the rafters with long standing ovations.
Crowds are slow at first.
Called Birds Of A Feather, the tour began in Northampton in October 1953, before visiting cities including Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham.
After a four-week run at the Nottingham Empire, Laurel wrote in a letter dated 19 January 1954 that show business in Britain was "not too good in general".
"They are all blaming the invasion of TV, which I don't think has anything to do with it. There is a terrific amount of unemployed plus a lot of labour trouble - strikes, etc," he wrote.
"Just a case of bad conditions in the country. The TV programs I've seen, would certainly drive people INTO a theatre - even to see a bad show! They are awful!"
Low-rent lodgings and half-empty theatres are an inauspicious start, but then Laurel and Hardy are cajoled into doing publicity to promote the shows. It's all added work with no extra pay. But things start to pick up. The houses start to sell out, securing them a prime booking at the Lyceum Theatre in London.
One performance even melts the coldly calculating heart of showbiz impresario Bernard Delfont, thanking Stan and Ollie for reminding him of why he fell in love with this profession in the first place, calling it “beautiful madness.” Lovers of the old theatres, and of the people who passed through them, from the performers to the usherettes, will know exactly the aptness of that phrase. It rings true, and it is supported by the testimony of those who were lucky enough to see the performances in 1953.
A local newspaper review said despite Hardy's obvious health issues on the night they performed, their "old cleverness and that delightful craziness is still there".
'You cried with laughter'
Joyce Harrison and David Bullock were in the audience at the Palace Theatre to see what turned out to be Laurel and Hardy's final stage performance.
Mrs Harrison was 14 when she went with her mum, who was a big fan.
"We sat near the front and the slapstick was absolutely brilliant - you cried with laughter it was so funny.
"We used to hear them on the radio because we didn't have any telly in those days, but to see them in person was completely different," she said.
She added the theatre was "absolutely packed" and it was a treat to be able to go with "not much money around in those days".
A brass plate outside the now disused Palace Theatre marks the pair's 1954 performance
In 1954 David Bullock, now 81, was working as an apprentice at Plymouth's dockyard.
"I remember seeing the posters - they used to have one at the front where you went to pay," he said.
"We used to see Laurel and Hardy at the Saturday morning pictures so when I heard they were coming to Plymouth, I thought 'I'll go and see them'.
"They were wearing the same black suits they always wore on television, with the bowler hats. I remember seeing all that."
I can hear Oliver Hardy in one of the shorts saying “now we're starting to get somewhere ...”
You always knew some disaster was about to befall the pair. (Not that Ollie ever lost his own very high opinion of himself). An old resentment over Oliver Hardy doing a film without Stan resurfaces. Audience numbers started to rise as the tour proceeded, but things came to an abrupt end on 17 May 1954. After a performance at the Palace Theatre in Plymouth, Ollie had a mild heart attack. The tour was over. The prospective film bringing Stan and Ollie back to the big screen falls through, too. In the end, they have each other, their memories and achievements. And it's more than enough. After Ollie was signed off by a doctor, the duo set sail from Hull back to America on 2 June, 1954. Stan Laurel would never return to England, the country of his birth, again. Stan tells Ollie on the boat back that he's been lying about the film, and that he knew two weeks earlier that the film was off. Ollie tells him that he knew. So why did Stan carry on writing lines and coming up with routines? “What else are we going to do?” In real life, Stan Laurel carried on writing for “Laurel and Hardy” after Ollie died, aged 65, in August 1957, until his own death in Los Angeles, aged 74, in 1965. Laurel refused to perform on stage or act in films without his best friend.
I guess I'll carry on writing, too, then, for that imaginary audience. God's a good enough public, said Thomas More, on his way to becoming a saint.
The twilight-mood of the film is perfectly judged, and it captures the longing and the melancholy at the heart of any life, even, and especially, the funniest and most joyous. There is an existential angst that strikes a chord within all of us with our mortal concerns, but strikes even deeper in the thespian heart. If all the world's a stage and each of us must play a part, what does an actor do when the day comes there is no longer an act?
Laurel and Hardy went home. Stan Laurel had his telephone number in the phone directory, and he would happily take calls from one and all to the end of his life.
The film neatly balances humour and pathos, bringing forth both laughter and tears. It's not slapstick comedy, more a reflective, even melancholic, love letter to that neverland that Laurel and Hardy transported us to in the days when the world was young. Forever young.
In alternating between happy and sad, in showing the world's greatest comedy duo at their lowest ebb as they fade into history, in threatening a tragic ending only to give us that reminder of glory days destined to be eternal at the close, the film hits all the right, and sweetest, of spots.
I'm hearing very many people who have seen this film say the same thing, that they were moved to tears and felt uplifted by “Stan and Ollie.” The warm heart, gentle nature and generous spirit of both the film and the memories of Laurel and Hardy it evokes are precisely what an increasingly divided, bitter, and angry world needs badly. The many people who are saying this now – and I am one of them – should be reminded that it was ever thus. The 1930s were years of division, bitterness, and anger, of course. I seem to remember Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator being condemned for merely laughing at Hitler, rather than proposing or aiding any effective politics to challenge Nazism. I think laughter, releasing the capacity for joy within, a capacity shared by each and all, would go a long way to checking totalitarian dangers of overpoliticisation. It's been decades since I read Alexander Herzen. I'll go from memory here, and stand correction. I read From the Other Shore (and maybe other essays printed with the book) some time in the early 1990s. There, Herzen cautions us never to trust any ideal that is incapable of laughing at itself, or allowing others so to do. I'll cry when I need, and laugh as a necessity. And distrust those who pick, analyze, and dissect in an insistence on making a very important and emancipatory point, for which we should all be grateful.
I remember laughing at the encounter of Bim-Bom the clown with the Cheka in the Russia of 1918. I thought my history lecturer was joking. He wasn't. As historians in the making, we had to sift through the claims and counter-claims to tell what the truth was. Unbelievable, whichever way you cut it. With revolutionary soldiers paralysed by laughter, the moral is clear: humour is counter-revolutionary! OK, I am simplifying and distorting somewhat, and relying on Alexander Serafimovich’s Civil War novel The Iron Flood (1924) rather than actual history. But it's an odd story, the story of Bim-Bom the clown, all the same. My sense of humour has seldom been appreciated in political circles either. It is just possible, of course, despite a wealth of great jokes, I'm just not as funny as I think I am. I digress a little, the point being that humour, and releasing the capacity for joy and laughter is not 'escapism' but is an essential human need, as essential to human beings as food, sex, and football. It's real, and can be described as “escape” only in the sense of a prisoner fleeing prison for a more happy and healthy habitus. It's a natural ethical imperative to escape in that sense. Seeing Ollie recovering from a heart attack in bed had me thinking and empathizing too. There are days when I feel like I am barely hanging on, working and writing for what end I don't know. The world seems hell-bent on catastrophe, and there's not a word I can say to stop it. On the days when I'm exposed to the rancor of political claim and counter-claim, the cacophonous world of the endless 'yes/no' of sophist politics, I don't feel like I want to hang on. I want escape, in the best sense of the word. I need it, and intend to get it. There is nothing comic about writing endlessly when few people actually read what you write, and fewer still understand it. And it is always possible that I may just be plain wrong and deluded. Either way, I'd be much better off doing something else entirely.
The film is not a comedy, but a drama, and the mood is often tense. There is betrayal in the air, and when it breaks it leads to accusation and counter-accusation on the part of both Stan and Ollie that threatens to destroy the myth of Laurel and Hardy for good. That it doesn't, that sour quickly turns to sweet, but earns that sweetness rather than contrives it for a happy ending, is the real merit of the film. It affirms redemptive possibilities in art as in life. That's not easy to do.
There's not much of a story. The drama is not stretched out. There are no great twists and turns. Even I could follow it without thinking too hard. The film is as warm and gentle as the comedy of its subjects, and that suits me just fine. I have issues enough to be dealing with in my own life. I'm trying desperately hard to simplify my life down to the essential core. That's what Laurel and Hardy are about – truth as essential core. They are, of course, losers. They want money, a nice house and car, an easy life, a cushy number, but are utterly lacking in the guile and intelligence that gets those things. So they fail, and in their failure they remain simple nice guys, innocents who somehow manage to survive, and even more remarkably retain their innocence, in an often cruel and cynical world. They appeal to our own youthful core, our own inner child. Such people never 'win' the world, and frequently come a cropper in the interface with reality. Laurel and Hardy never did, not on screen. It's a fantasy. The film attempts to portray an innocence preserved, or regained, in real life, and succeeds like a dream. I'm a lifelong Laurel and Hardy fan, one of the believers in that fantasy never-world their friendship evoked on screen. We have had a succession of films now on old comedy favourites, portraying their sad lives and 'dark' secrets. We all know the tears of the clown. Comedians are prone to depression. It's the nature of the comedic art. In order to turn the world upside down to portray it in all its absurdity, a comedian has to know reality intimately, stare its stupidities and realities stark in the face. It's a dangerous profession. I can handle the truth about all my comedy favourites, Tony Hancock etc etc. I don't think I could have handled a Laurel and Hardy in antagonistic relation to each other, sad, broken, defeated by life. The film threatened such an ending. And then gave us what, deep down, we all wanted – Laurel and Hardy going out with a song and a dance. As Stan Laurel told us: “You have to learn what people will laugh at, then proceed accordingly.”
The ending rang true. That was what was most moving. Fantastical. But not fantasy. Very real, actually. The film stands as an affectionate tribute to a comedic double act whose generous spirit and warm heart has burned deep into the collective consciousness.
It's a warm-hearted tribute that will mean more to those of us brought up on a TV diet of Laurel and Hardy. I know those old shorts like the back of my hand, the scenes and set-pieces, the sayings, the mannerisms and looks. So this film doesn't have to work hard at all in selling Laurel and Hardy. I “get” the points and references. Those who don't may not appreciate the many layers of this film.
So in reviewing the film, I have to say that what you see in the film and take from it depends on who you are. If you don't know Laurel and Hardy, the film is still a gentle, undemanding tale of old entertainers who brought joy to the lives of millions and, in the end, hopefully, found some in their own lives, not least in their relation to each other.
If you do know Laurel and Hardy, then you will simply love this film.
The appeal of Laurel and Hardy is not difficult to understand. To begin with, their humour is simple and direct, and their personalities warm and engaging. They are unthreatening and unchallenging. We have a feature on a BBC Radio 2 programme called “Winning at Life,” which invites people to message in their tales of how they are “winning at life.” I loathe it. I'm all for life-affirming activities, but this whole notion of “winning at life” seems so shallow and superficial, oblivious to the reality of life as a series of little losses and ending in one big loss, at least in the physical sense. Laurel and Hardy were not “winners” in life in this sense. They lived at a time when few people were winners in this sense. They were losers who were constantly struggling against adversity, and not least their own inadequacies. Both were stupid. But it was the fact that the pompous Ollie thought he was smarter than he actually was that constantly got the pair into trouble. Not that the ensuing disaster ever came close to wising Ollie up any. “That's another fine mess you've gotten me into,” he would say to Stan. But they stuck together, through thin and thinner. And kept smiling. We love them as losers like us, and we love the encouragement to keep smiling. Because, after all, for all that we don't have and fail to achieve, we do actually have the things that matter most.
The film is a pleasure from first to last. It affirms and celebrates this great comedy duo, has them acknowledging the worth of their shared past as they sail off to an uncertain future.
It struck a chord with me, caught in the middle of a number of heart examinations with a view to assessing possible damage, facing the possibility of undergoing an operation deemed “too risky” a couple of years ago. It's all the result of overwork, stress, and anxiety, and I am currently following the advice of my doctors and nurses closely in order to pull clear of what was looking a very grim prospect just before Christmas. I see Ollie suffering in this film, I see the need to keep working for money, despite failing health, and I see years of hard work and achievement behind the duo, and I so empathize. It doesn't look like much of a reward. Then I see what these guys had, what they did, how they conveyed so much joy, and I see this acknowledged, affirmed, and celebrated at the end, not least by the two characters themselves. And it does my old heart good.
The film is charming and funny, and that makes it something to take to heart and cherish. It's a film with a big heart and a beautiful soul.
So I welcome this new film, “Stan and Ollie,” as a new friend, and a delightful companion for many years to come, God willing.
John C Reilly calls it right, Laurel and Hardy were “humanists.” They didn't rely on smart-alec cynical humour or even make contemporary references, they relied on “eternal truths about the human condition and they had a lot of sympathy and empathy for the world.” You can see it plainly in their work. They demonstrated a commitment to their audience and a care for human beings. They had a pact with their audience and they honoured it in full.
I'm going to watch the film again tomorrow. Given half the chance, I'd watch it every day. I think I must have seen "Amelie" twenty times over the years. I look forward to reaching twenty views of "Stan and Ollie." I'll treat it as having old friends round. In fact, having seen them every morning when I was young, Laurel and Hardy are practically family.
"I'll miss us when we're gone."
Wonderful interview with Steve Coogan and John C Reilly. Oliver the romantic, the southern gentleman, Stan the northern Englishman, writer, workaholic, sacrificing happiness for art. Both very humble men; both geniuses.
They are different people, in so many ways, but complement one another. You would have thought that we would have learned this lesson by now.
I don't want to hear about the state of the world at the moment. Because I know, and the odds are I've known a lot longer than most. And I know how deep the problems go. Not least my own. As bad a state as it may be in, it isn't short of helpers. I've been helping the world for so long, at such personal expense, that whilst the world may stand on the brink of catastrophe, it is in better shape than I am, and will last a whole lot longer than I will. I seem to be having everything tested at the moment. I've reached the stage at which I don't know what is working anymore, or for what purpose. I'm sure the world will carry on without me. And the grass won't pay no mind.
Too much effort, too much strain, too little support.
Still, I may well be in a world of my own. And why not? It's better than the hopeless misery I see all around. I used to think I wasn't alone on this. But now I'm not so sure. I'm looking at a life of wasted words, wasted energy, wasted time, wasted talent. So I'm reverting to the simple truths I knew for certain when I was young. I've no idea what these medical tests I am undergoing will show. I do know that stress and anxiety are putting me forever on the cusp of serious depressive illness. I've been campaigning for something or other non-stop since I was in Sheffield at the time of The Miners' Strike (1984-1985). I was in Sheffield again in 1989, on the receiving end of another heap of misery. I was campaigning to avert environmental catastrophe from the late 1980s. Same on warnings concerning the process of EU integration, warnings on financial deregulation, you name it - all ignored, having no effect on anything other than my physical and mental health. I'm tired of it all. The world looks an increasingly bleak place to me. That it does to others, too, indicates that there may be some objective truth to it all. So it's not a mental state. I don't like a world of shouting heads and deaf ears, the endless clash of assertion and counter-assertion. I've spent a lifetime being ignored. Telling the truth for a quarter of a century on the Hillsborough disaster is but one of many examples, but at least there I wasn't alone. More often than not, in all areas, I've been ignored, overlooked, disregarded. And now I'm tired. I have nothing to say that could be heard in such a world. And since that does seem to be the world we live in, I may as well say nothing, and see if I can put my life and health on an even keel.
People are commenting on how warming the "Stan and Ollie" film as we face an "uncertain future." My future isn't "uncertain." Either I turn health and wealth around now, or I have no future.
It's all very simple, really: living it is the difficult part. I may as well make a start now. Thanks Stan and Ollie for bringing me back to the essential humanist core. Better late than never.
I'll add the words of Andrew Collins as an appendix of sorts:
★★★★★
It will be difficult to convey to younger folk, but I was part of a generation that grew up watching black-and-white TV without complaint. As a result of this innocently monochrome early upbringing, I made no distinction between what was old and what was new. So, when the BBC broadcast Laurel and Hardy films during the school holidays in the early 1970s, I bore no prejudice towards the fact that many of these delightful capsules of vaudevillian shtick were already 40 years old – of even greater vintage in the case of the duo’s silent shorts, which were also shown.
I will always value this home education: the comfort and joy of watching a fat man and a thin man coexist in a square frame, often jostling to find their mark, barging each other to one side, or picking up the other’s bowler hat and placing it on the wrong head. From expat Lancashire lad Stan Laurel and southern gentleman Oliver Hardy, I learned everything there was to know about slapstick, precision and timing, attuned forever to physical comedy. Screenwriter Jeff Pope is of a similar vintage – he’s commented that their movies make him feel like “it is forever a Saturday morning and I am six years old watching the TV at home utterly spellbound.”
this latest slice of extraordinary life concentrates on the theatre tour in Britain and Ireland that Stan and Ollie undertook in the mid-50s, when they already appeared to dwindling audiences like a heritage act.
The story begins in happier, snappier times, in 1937 at the height of their pre-war pomp. We join them in sun-blessed Hollywood on a technically astounding, seemingly continuous single tracking shot. It’s as if Stan and Ollie have been brought back to life by Steve Coogan and John C Reilly as we tail them through the MGM backlot while they discuss contractual options and fall into character whenever addressed by starlet or stagehand. We come to a stop on the soundstage of Way Out West, where producer Hal Roach (Danny Huston) berates Stan for some boozy public indiscretion and threatens to fire him. They take their places in front of a backcloth and shoot what will become the beloved, dainty dance routine to At the Ball, That’s All, an innocent jewel of a sequence that Laurel and Hardy have down pat. Despite storm clouds gathering, we’re witnessing peak Laurel and Hardy, a heyday the pair lonesomely pine for during the rest of this melancholy film.
some business with a bell at the desk of a Newcastle hotel; an oversized trunk that bumps down some stairs.
The question is, though: to fully appreciate Stan & Ollie, must you share its aching nostalgia for a melancholy subject, its fading seaside-postcard setting and a kitsch map with animated arrows to guide us around Britain? Will it offer anything meaningful to an audience under the age of 40?
it may lack purchase for a millennial demographic.
At the end of the last reel, it’s clear that Stan & Ollie is a film about friendship – after all, it was the pair’s early natural chemistry as solo performers that fed the double-act and nourished it for almost 30 years.
For its target audience of hopeless hankerers after a simpler past, Stan & Ollie will be an absolute delight. But it may go over the hearts and heads of the uninitiated, that’s all.
Released in cinemas on Friday 11 January 2019
To which I say: get initiated!