Film Forum Finds Itself in Another Fine Mess

Leo McCarey’s “Wrong Again,” released in 1929, is a typical effort by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy being a shambolic accumulation of events keyed to a threadbare premise. This time around, our heroes mistake a top-of-the-line race horse for, of all things, Thomas Gainsborough’s “The Blue Boy” (1770). In the process, they learn that the wealthy are a species apart. “These millionaires are peculiar people,” Ollie tells Stan, “they think just the opposite of other people.” This attribute attends to their taste in art as well. Unbeknownst to Stan, Ollie has inadvertently damaged a piece of antique statuary, a full standing female nude, during a delivery made to a rich man’s mansion. Without paying heed to anatomical logic, Ollie puts it back together with the backside facing front. When Stan encounters the restored masterwork he undergoes a gamut of reactions in which Laurel the seasoned comedian proves his mettle. Bewilderment leads to shock leads to revelation in less than a minute. Film Forum will be mounting a two-week retrospective of films featuring the skinny man, the fat man and, pace Laurel, “two minds without a single thought.” The program errs on the side of two-reel comedies, a format well-suited to the duo’s circumscribed artistic scope. The venue’s repertory director, Bruce Goldstein, did nab their best features, including William A. Seiter’s “Sons of the Desert” (1933) and James W. Horne’s “Way Out West” (1937). The latter features Stan and Ollie doing a song-and-dance routine that is short on precision, long on charm, and among their most winning moments.Laurel and Hardy seem like a phenomenon foretold. The truth is less neat. Having traveled from his native Britain to the U.S. with a comedy troupe that included an up-and-comer named Charles Chaplin, Laurel knocked about his adopted country as a stage actor and Hollywood gagman. Born at Harlem, Georgia, Hardy traveled west convinced he was a more formidable actor than those he saw at the moving picture shows. After spending a decade working as solo talents, often in each other’s films, the two men found their groove in partnership.McCarey is often credited as the man who paired the actors, though producer Hal Roach recognized their chemistry, as did Laurel. Comedyphiles haggle over which picture is the duo’s official debut, but “Should Married Men Go Home?” (1928) has the distinction of being the first to list them as a team. Unlike their compadres in silent comedy, the pair found their way into sound without a glitch. Their voices, respectively lilting and fussy, suited the cadence of their gags. That, and their movies didn’t make a fetish of the new technology.Stan Laurel received an honorary Oscar in 1961 for “his creative pioneering in the field of cinema comedy,” but the team had already won a gold statuette for Best Live Action Comedy Short almost four decades earlier with “The Music Box” (1932). The plot? Moving a piano up a flight of stairs. The rub? Gravity and haplessness. The gags are less important than the unshakable chemistry between our two leads, and the increasing levels of frustration they endure. Watching it, you understand why Samuel Beckett counted himself a fan.Perhaps the least typical of the films is McCarey’s “Liberty” (1929), in which Stan and Ollie are fugitives on the lam who wind up escaping from the authorities by running up the girders of a construction site. Did I mention that Stan has, through a set of convoluted circumstances, acquired a live crab in his pants? Be that as it may, Laurel and Hardy traverse similar territory seen in the famed Harold Lloyd thrill vehicle, “Safety Last” (1923).Such daredeviltry was not an inherent part of the duo’s forte, but they acquit themselves nicely all the same — that is to say, with bumbling elan. “Laurel & Hardy” is as good a place to lose yourself during another fine mess of a New York City summer.

Film Forum Finds Itself in Another Fine Mess

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