Saturday, August 23, highlights on Turner Classic Movies:
There are some who find Laurel & Hardy painfully funny. There are others who find them merely painful. I belong to the latter group.
TCM premieres include Night Owls (1930), Brats (1930), Hog Wild (1930), Be Big! (1931), Laughing Gravy (1931), Our Wife, and The Chimp (1932).
Come next Saturday, Laurel & Hardy fans will be spending all day in front of their TV sets. I’ll be elsewhere.
23 Saturday
3:00 AM Short Film: Night Owls (1930)
Two vagrants try to help a police officer save his reputation. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Edgar Kennedy. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 20 min.3:25 AM Short Film: Blotto (1930)
Stan steals his wife’s secret bottle of liquor so he can have a wild night out at the Rainbow club with Ollie. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy BW-26 min.3:55 AM Short Film: Brats (1930)
Two fathers try to spend a quiet night despite their raucous offspring. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 20 min.4:20 AM Short Film: Hog Wild (1930)
Two friends try to install a radio antenna, with disastrous results. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Fay Holderness. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 19 min.4:45 AM Short Film: Be Big (1931)
Two married men feign illness so they can ditch their wives and attend a lodge party. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Anita Garvin. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 28 min.5:15 AM Short Film: Laughing Gravy (1931)
Roommates try to hide a dog from their grouchy landlord. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charlie Hall. Director: James W. Home. Black and white. 20 min.5:50 AM Short Film: Our Wife (1931)
A man tries to help his best friend elope. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Babe London. Director: James W. Horne. Black and white. 20 min.6:15 AM Short Film: Pardon Us (1931)
Selling homemade beer lands a two friends in prison together. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, June Marlowe. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 64 min.7:30 AM Short Film: One Good Turn (1931)
Two vagrants try to repay the kindly old lady who helped them. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Mary Carr. Director: James W. Horne. Black and white. 20 min.7:55 AM Short Film: Beau Hunks (1931)
After being dumped by his girlfriend, “Jeanie-Weenie,” Oliver makes Laurel join the Foreign Legion with him. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy BW-37 min.8:35 AM Short Film: Helpmates (1932)
A married man has to get his house back in order before his wife returns. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Bobby Burns. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 20 min.9:00 AM Bonnie Scotland (1935)
Two Americans in search of a Scottish inheritance wind up serving with the British in India. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson. Director: James Horne. Black and white. 81 min.10:25 AM Short Film: The Fixer Uppers (1935)
Comedic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have a no fail plan to help a jealous wife woo her husband, but somehow things go wrong. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy Dir: Charles Rogers BW-20 min.10:50 AM Them Thar Hills (1934)
When they go to the mountains for a rest to cure Ollie’s gout, the two accidentally get high on moonshine dumped into the well by local moonshiners trying to evade the law. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Mae Busch. Director: Charles Rogers. Black and white. 20 min.11:15 AM Tit For Tat (1935)
A Laurel and Hardy sequel to Them Thar Hills – they open an electrical repair shop and discover that their neighbor/grocer are the same couple they had a run in with in Them Thar Hills. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Mae Busch. Director: Charles Rogers. Black and white. 19 min.11:40 AM Short Film: The Live Ghost (1934)
A sea captain hires comedic duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to trick sailors into working on his supposedly haunted boat. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy Dir: Charles Rogers BW-20 min.12:05 PM The Devil’s Brother (1933)
Two wannabe bandits are hired as servants by the real thing. Cast: Laurel & Hardy, Dennis King, Thelma Todd. Director: Hal Roach. Black and white. 90 min.1:40 PM Short Film: Me and My Pal (1933)
A groom and his best man get preoccupied with a jigsaw puzzle on their way to the wedding. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, James Finlayson. Director: Lloyd French, Charley Rogers. Black and white. 20 min.2:10 PM Short Film: Their First Mistake (1932)
After adopting a baby to save his marriage, a man discovers his wife has left him. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Mae Busch. Director: George Marshall. Black and white. 21 min.2:35 PM Pack Up Your Troubles (1932)
Two World War I veterans try help a comrade’s orphaned daughter find her family. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Don Dillaway. Director: George Marshall, Ray McCarey. Black and white. 66 min.3:45 PM Short Film: Scram! (1932)
Two vagrants ordered out of town take up with a drunken tycoon. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Richard Cramer. Director: Ray McCarey. Black and white. 20 min.4:10 PM Short Film: County Hospital (1932)
A hospital visitor wreaks havoc during a routine visit. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Billy Gilbert. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 19 min.4:30 PM Short Film: The Chimp (1932)
A jealous husband thinks two tenants sneaking a pet chimp into their apartment are carrying on with his wife. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Billy Gilbert. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 25 min.5:00 PM The Music Box (1932)
Two men running a moving company have to get a large piano up a daunting flight of stairs. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Billy Gilbert. Director: James Parrott. Black and white. 29 min.5:35 PM Sons of the Desert (1933)
Two friends hatch a harebrained scheme to attend a lodge convention over their wives’ objections. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase. Director: William A. Seiter. Black and white. 65 min.6:45 PM Way Out West (1938)
A pair of tenderfeet try to get the deed to a gold mine to its rightful owner. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Sharon Lynne. Director: James W. Horne. Black and white. 64 min.8:00 PM Swiss Miss (1938)
When they’re swindled, two salesmen have to work off their debts in a Swiss hotel. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy Walter Woolf King. Director: John G. Blystone. Black and white. 65 min.9:15 PM Block-Heads (1938)
Chaos erupts when a man tries to help an old war buddy. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Minna Gombell. Director: John G. Blystone. Black and white. 57 min.10:15 PM The Flying Deuces (1939)
Two bumblers join the Foreign Legion to forget a beautiful woman. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Jean Parker. Director: A. Edward Sutherland. Black and white. 65 min.11:25 PM A Chump at Oxford (1939)
When they accidentally capture a bank robber, two street cleaners are given a scholarship to Oxford. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardey, Wilfred Lucas. Director: Alfred J. Goulding. Black and white. 63 min.12:30 AM Saps at Sea (1940)
Two factory workers accidentally set sail with an escaped killer. Cast: Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel, James Finlayson. Director: Gordon M. Douglas. Black and white. 58 min.1:30 AM Air Raid Wardens (1943)
A pair of bumblers stumble upon Nazi spies on the home front. Cast: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Edgar Kennedy. Director: Edward Sedgwick. Black and white. 67 min.
Schedule (PT) and synopses from the TCM website.
6 comments
I have enjoyed L H as a school boy, then with my children and then with my grand-children. If you don’t like LH you should visit a Psychologist
Sorry that you find L&H painful — I find them blissfully funny, so much so that I’ve spent a good chunk of my life researching their lives and careers and writing about them. I was blessed to know and interview more than 60 of their co-workers and associates and also to see most of the scripts for their films, all of which had very funny scenes which weren’t in the final release print. Fellow L&H devotees might want to check out my book, “Laurel & Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies,” which was first published in 1987 but massively expanded and revised in 2016. (It’s 630 pages and weighs six pounds; if you can’t get to the gym, you can just lift the book.) More info is here: bonaventurepress.com/titles/laurel-hardy/
Laurel and Hardy on classic movie
I want to get a smallish collection of the best L&H. So what do I go for – the early solo stuff, the shorts, or the features. Can anyone advise?
Tim
Since this recommendation is coming from you, Harry, I’ll make sure to have my DVD recorder ready (while I’m sweating away at the gym) for “Their First Mistake”…
Enjoy your afternoon at the gym. “Their First Mistake,” though, is well worth a break from the treadmill. In it, the boys who inspired that queer homage in The Killing of Sister George are finally coming out (with it):
Hardy: She [the wife who just left him] always says that I think more of you than I do of her.
Laurel: Well, you do, don’t you?
Hardy: We won’t go into that!
And then they get into bed for some pretty kinky action.
After catching up with Hardy’s cross-dressing in The Lottery Man (1916) up in Ithaca and visiting Hal Roach’s grave in Elmira, I went so far as to purchase a 21-DVD set of Laurel and Hardy. Now I’m doing my darndest to justify the expense.
Cheers, Harry
broadcastellan.blogspot.com/2008/07/going-ithaca-or-hardy-welcome.html
broadcastellan.blogspot.com/2008/07/pardon-me-im-with-stupid.html