New York Times: The Stan Laurel Collection, Vol. 2

[silentfilm]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/08/movies/homevideo/08dvds.html?_r=2&ref=movies&oref=slogin&oref=login

THE STAN LAUREL COLLECTION, VOLUME 2

In the many short films and features they made together from the late 1920s to the early ’50s, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy present such fully developed characters and such an enduring portrait of friendship that it’s hard to believe that Laurel had an existence independent of his partner. But exist he did, and as the recently issued second volume of “The Stan Laurel Collection” from Kino illustrates, it was an extensive and varied existence.

Born in England in 1890, Laurel first came to America as a member of Fred Karno’s comedy troupe, in which he worked as an understudy to the company’s star, Charles Chaplin. Some of his earliest film roles, as in the 1918 “Huns and Hyphens,” find him unapologetically imitating that former colleague. When he goes to work for the producer Hal Roach, in films like “Just Rambling Along” (1918) and “A Man About Town” (1923), he trades Chaplin’s bowler and baggy pants for the straw hat and white ducks of Harold Lloyd, Roach’s most popular star. And the new volume includes several of Laurel’s parodies of the hit films of the day, like “Mud and Sand” (1922), in which he appears, his hair slicked back with shiny pomade, as the matinee idol Rhubarb Vaselino.

But then there are shorts, like the 1924 “Detained,” in which the childlike character of the Laurel and Hardy years seems almost fully formed: the wide-eyed expressions of wonder, the sudden eruptions of tears and the eerily blank look that crosses his face when he’s bored or distracted are all there, ready to coalesce. Just as it is difficult to define the first true “Laurel and Hardy” film — the two appeared together in several of Roach’s all-star comedy shorts before they were perceived as a team — it is also hard to say when Stan Laurel stepped out of the shadow of his influences and became the Stanley we know and love. But to watch the process, as these 21 short films allow us to do, carries its own fascination. (Kino International, $29.95, not rated)
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Bruce Calvert
http://www.silentfilmstillarchive.com