Comic Amhassadors:
WOLFE, HENRY C.
Comic Ambassadors Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy. By John McCabe. Doubleday. 240 pp. $4.50. Reviewed by Henry C. Wolfe Author, "The German Octopus," "The Imperial Soviets" On the train from Zagreb...
...they exclaimed with relief...
...In New York the police had to rescue them from multitudes of enthusiastic admirers...
...But why don't Americans send us some Laurel and Hardy pictures, even very old ones...
...Laurel was still living, I told them...
...Some 10 months later in Warsaw, I saw a Polish audience, momentarily forgetting the threat of Nazi invasion (which came three weeks later), guffaw over the endearing stupidity of the American comedians...
...Oliver Norvell Hardy was a small-town Georgia boy with aspirations to a career as a tenor...
...They never get anywhere because they are both so dumb but they don't know that they're dumb...
...It was there that he picked up the name of Babe...
...When television revived the Laurel and Hardy pictures, the comedians did not receive a penny in royalties...
...Movie shorts went out of fashion...
...About 1940...
...Their boat-train was delayed an hour...
...One of the reasons why people like us, I guess, is because they feel so superior to us...
...After six years of hard, successful work "the boys" decided to go abroad for some fishing, golf and plenty of rest...
...Americans can scarcely appreciate the hold that these two amiable buffoons have had on the peoples of Europe...
...on the Continent they were given local names—Stan and Bran in Romania, Stanlio and Olio in Yugoslavia...
...First Stan had a light stroke...
...Life is hard in Yugoslavia," the younger boy explained, "and Laurel and Hardy films would make it seem easier for us...
...From silents they moved easily into sound pictures, one- and two-reel films...
...In addition, because of a change in studios and a resultant lack of supervision, their films lost much of their sparkle...
...And in Paris the President of France sent his car for them and "they rode like conquerors down the Champs Elysées...
...And, ironically, it seems not to have occurred to the directors of our information program abroad that, in person and on film, the favorite comics were naturals as ambassadors of good will...
...In London they were met at Waterloo Station by enormous crowds...
...Some years later, when they got new studio backing, tragedy struck...
...Stanlio still lives...
...Reviewed by Henry C. Wolfe Author, "The German Octopus," "The Imperial Soviets" On the train from Zagreb to Ljubljana the compartment door opened and two bright-faced boys faced me expectantly...
...Is it true, sir," the older lad inquired, "that Laurel and Hardy are dead...
...After talking with Stan and Ollie fans from Dublin to Istanbul, however, I believe that audiences identified themselves with the absurdly contrasted pair whose good intentions were consistently betrayed...
...In England they were usually spoken of as "the thin one and the fat one...
...Laurel and Hardy," their biographer comments, "come from a great tradition of clowns—from the rogue servants of Greek comedy, the buffoons of the commedia dell' arte, the Bottoms and Dogberrys of the Elizabethan theatre, the red-nosed comedians of vaudeville and the music halls—and it is a compound of all these that constitutes their eomic quotient...
...Stan got an early start in English music halls and reached the American stage in 1910...
...The harassed, bumbling comics were modern Everymen...
...Then in 1957 Babe suffered a massive, and eventually fatal, stroke...
...By separate circuitous routes the comedians finally arrived in Hollywood, where they came together in the Hal Roach studios...
...This was especially true in the '30s, when virtually every city and town outside the Soviet Union enjoyed Laurel and Hardy comedies...
...Stan Laurel suggested that people loved them and their pictures because they put so much love into their film-making...
...At the Drury Lane theater the next evening they "took bows standing in the royal box...
...Is it too late to give their films international showing now...
...Eventually, they gave up...
...As it turned out, they got none of them...
...They were "angered at the knowledge that their names were being used to advertise deodorants, hair oil, beer and floor wax without their remuneration or consent...
...McCabe's entertaining, affectionate biography assembles for the first time the unique story of "the boys...
...One evening in Paris during the Munich crisis, I watched an audience seek escape from the frightening newspaper headlines by following Laurel and Hardy antics in Way Out West...
...As Stan explained: "We had no say on those films, and it sure looked it...
...The first picture in which they both appeared, Slipping Wives, was a 1926 silent...
...The laughter that greeted the pre-film cuckoo notes was laughter with, rather than at...
...fortune turned against Stan and Babe...
...When their ship reached Southampton the docks swarmed with fans who had waited for hours to see them...
...Unlike gagsters and slapstick specialists, the gentlemanly mimes had universal appeal...
...In this book, John McCabe, Associate Professor of Dramatic Art at New York University, gives us at least some of the answers...
...Jack Benny thinks that "by placing themselves into basic situations they are understood by people of all ages and all walks of life...
...Might they ask the American a question...
...How explain their hold on audiences, American and European...
...Ollie Hardy had his own explanation: "These two fellows we created, they are nice, very nice people...
...Stan Laurel, christened Arthur Stanley Jefferson, was born in Lancashire, England, son of a theatrical producer, actor and playwright...
...Babe's slow burn and Stan's slower thinking, the fat fellow's tietwiddle and his skinny pal's tearless cry gradually combined to keep audiences laughing...
...At eight, Oliver ran away with Coburn's minstrels and finally landed on the Luhin lot in Jacksonville...
Vol. 44 • April 1961 • No. 16
