- #Laurel and hardy movies female co stars professional#
- #Laurel and hardy movies female co stars series#
Lots of films here are missing bits and pieces this one lacks half its running time and shows visible deterioration, yet it’s a delight.
The daughter masquerades as her twin brother, and then this “brother” is told to dress as his sister!Ĭonstructed with mathematical elegance, Hello Trouble is a comedy of adultery and nosy neighbors. In Married to Order, Hardy plays the nearsighted father who doesn’t want his daughter (Rosemary Theby) to marry a “mollycoddle” (Chase). That one’s directed by Charles Parrott, better known as dapper comedian Charley Chase, and he directs himself and Hardy in the disc’s two highlights, also from 1918. The best West is He’s In Again (1918), where Billy dances in drag and performs a boxing match. Two of them star Billy West, a flagrant and not-bad imitation of Charlie Chaplin. Hardy now seems comfortable and commanding.Ī bunch of films in which Hardy adopts bushy eyebrows and often a mustache follow. Hardy’s domination of them indicates the growing popularity that led to forming his own unit for General, with several films directed by himself–alas, none here. The problem, as the notes observe, is that the characters don’t come across as a team but merely as two people in the same stories.
#Laurel and hardy movies female co stars series#
These are examples of Hardy’s first series character, the Plump and Runt shorts. Then come three 1916 films directed by Will Louis for General Film Company. The episode shows Hardy playing a burglar under grotesque makeup. Rufus Wallingford (1915), based on George Randolph Chester’s Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford, a lovable con artist who branched out from short stories into plays and films. He appeared in an episode of Theodore Wharton’s serial, The New Adventures of J. Relocating to New York, Hardy worked for a number of studios not included here, such as Edison. One of these, A Lucky Strike (1915), stars Hotaling’s gangly comedienne wife Mae Hotely as a servant who unwittingly romances a sweet-natured gold miner (Hardy). Hotaling directs the other three Lubin productions here. Apart from the story’s appeal, this film gets our attention with a few startling closeups.Īrthur D. Masquerading was a common trope in silent films, as was making or losing money. In possibly the most interesting title, An Expensive Visit (Will Louis, 1915), his character is a college student whose role is sidelined for the antics of a cross-dressing Raymond McKee making a fool of the student’s old father (Ed Lawrence). His size is sometimes part of his personality, sometimes not. Hardy has no consistent personality from one film to another, appearing now as an overgrown mama’s boy, now as a hapless suitor, now as a regular fellow. Most are lost, of course, and this set offers four of them. Since Hardy began several years earlier and features in the oldest films here, we’ll discuss him first.įrom 1914 to 1915, Babe Hardy (as he was often credited) appeared in at least 66 films for Arthur Lubin’s studio in Jacksonville, Florida. I assume this is because Laurel’s work is stronger overall, as this established music-hall comic came to Hollywood and more or less started at the top. Lobster Films, the Library of Congress, and Blackhawk Films have assembled and restored many of those solos into Flicker Alley’s new Blu-ray, Laurel or Hardy: Early Films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.ĭisc 1 is devoted to Laurel, and Disc 2 covers Hardy. Less well-known to the casual viewer is that each man had long solo careers in comedy shorts before their magic combined in that glorious synergy.
However, they wouldn’t officially team up until 1927.
#Laurel and hardy movies female co stars professional#
Porter‘s The Great Train Robbery(1903), and he can be called the man responsible for the duo’s professional meeting. Best known as the first western star, Anderson is the man who fires a gun at the camera for the iconic ending of Edwin S. Laurel and Hardy first appeared together in The Lucky Dog, shot early in 1921 for producer G.M. Evidence of this statement can be found in last year’s Blu-ray collection, reviewed by PopMatters in “ Laurel & Hardy’s Genius of Everday Chaos“. When skinny British music-hall comedian Stanley Laurel met portly American film comic Oliver Hardy, the result was cinema’s most enduring and beloved comedy duo.