Stan & Ollie

Full disclosure: I am a huge Laurel and Hardy fan. I've seen most of their films, especially the two-reelers that they made in the '30s (the features aren't as good, IMHO) and I've been watching them and reading about them for over forty years.

So it was with some trepidation that I awaited Stan & Ollie, a biopic directed by Jon S. Baird, with Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly as the boys. I didn't want to see a hatchet job, or a modern-day recreation like they did with The Three Stooges a while back.

I'm happy to report that Stan & Ollie holds its characters with affection and reverence. It has to have a conflict, so they do have a fight late in the film, and I'm not sure how accurate that is, because everything I've read suggests they were very good friends, unlike a lot of comedy teams. Stan & Ollie is really a film about a bromance, and because the two of them married so many women (seven, between the two of them) their relationship to each other may have been the most important of their lives.

The film begins with a prologue, set in 1937, at the height of their fame. They are filming Way Out West, and Stan wants out of his contract with Hal Roach (played in one scene as a villain, by Danny Huston) so he can own his own pictures. But Ollie's contract is not up yet. Stan moves on, but Ollie makes one film with Harry Langdon, which Stan never gets over.

We then cut to 1953. The boys are getting old, and to drum up publicity over a version of Robin Hood that Stan wants to make, they go on tour in old vaudeville halls in England and Scotland. At first they are playing to half-empty houses, but they start doing more publicity and eventually they are playing to packed houses. But Ollie is a lot bigger, and is having heart trouble.

From what I know, the characterizations by Coogan and Reilly are spot-on. Reilly looks much more like Hardy than Coogan looks like Laurel, and at times I forgot I wasn't actually watching Hardy/ Reilly has his voice down pat, with that hint of the Southern gentleman (Hardy was born in Georgia). While Coogan never convinced me he was Stan, he at least sounded like him, and showed what a comic genius Laurel was. It was a bit disconcerting to see Laurel, who always played the child-like simpleton, as the brain behind the outfits, writing the scripts. Hardy was laid back and basically just rolled with whatever Stan wanted to do.

They were paired by accident (Roach put them together) but became lifelong friends. As mentioned, in the film they have a dust-up where they say things they don't mean, but it's all the more satisfying when they reconcile. When Stan tells his wife, "I love him," it's hard not to get a tear in the eye.

Movies about comedians are sometimes tough because when you show a comedian with an audience laughing at him/her, and they aren't funny, it immediately takes you out of the movie. But Laurel and Hardy were always funny. They do a sketch I've never seen before, involving two doors in a train station, which is comedy gold. They also do a skit from the film County Hospital, in which Stan brings a bed-ridden Hardy some "hard boiled eggs and nuts," a phrase that every L&H fan knows. There is also an inside joke when a trunk they are carrying slides down the stairs. If you've seen The Music Box, you'll get it.

The film doesn't really transcend its subject matter, and the plot is thin, but it's a very pleasurable time at the movies. The decor looks great, and Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson are terrific as the boys' last wives. For Laurel and Hardy fans this is a must, and for those who don't know them it's a nice springboard. A lot of their films are on YouTube, and there is a huge complete DVD set which includes every film they made, except for Babes in Toyland (known in the U.S. as March of the Wooden Soldiers). Probably a rights thing.