Stan Laurel

Carpenters drive to and “work” at a planing mill. Relying heavily on pantomime (Stan speaks only 24 words!), as well as violent but unhurried slapstick, this rates as one of the team’s finest shorts. When fans wrote to Laurel late in life and asked for recommendations, he would often say BUSY BODIES and TOWED IN A HOLE. Curiously they were made within a year of one another, and have the same tructure — Laurel & Hardy, dressed in overalls, start out in an open car, driving to work, where their construction labors are unsupervised nonsense, and they wreck everything, including their even-then antique flivver for the finish. Directed by Lloyd French. With Charlie Hall.

After too much high living, the fellows rent a trailer and take to the mountains for gout-ridden Hardy’s health. There they unwittingly drink from well water laced with homemade liquor. According to Billy Gilbert, who plays the doctor prescribing a mountain-rest cure, “the fellows” is how everyone at the studio referred to the Laurel & Hardy characters. Aficionados today are still acting out the memorable, musical “pom-pom” business. The “outdoors” set was built on Stage 2 in only 16 hours after a planned scenic exterior location at the mouth of the Santa Ynez Canyon presented unfavorable weather conditions. Directed by Charley Rogers. With Charlie Hall and Mae Busch as the sullen motorist and his stranded wife.

Mousetrap salesmen visit Switzerland where they run into difficulties with a disagreeable gorilla and a tyrannical chef at a Tyrolean hotel. The film features a romantic subplot with opera singers Walter Woolf King from Broadway (and the Marx Brothers’ A NIGHT AT THE OPERA) and Della Lind from Vienna (later a neighbor of Laurel’s at his Oceana Hotel residence in Santa Monica during the 1960s). Eric Blore from the Astaire-Rogers pictures adds just the right note. Many individual scenes are notable, including where Stan feigns illness and creates a “snowstorm” to trick a St. Bernard dog into giving up his keg of brandy. Expensive production values (as demanded by Laurel in his new contract) befitting a picturesque spectacle, including location shooting at Stone Canyon and Lake Arrowhead, contributed to a huge financial loss, the worst in the studio’s history to date. Laurel’s private life was in shambles at the time, and in a key disagreement with Roach, he failed to see the wisdom in some editing The Boss ordered. It was during a swaying trestle bridge scene involving a piano and that certain gorilla, a sequence made famous by noted critic James Agee’s celebration of it. Directed by John G. Blystone. With Anita Garvin, persuaded by Laurel to return to the company.

Traveling fish peddlers — crabs a specialty — devise a big business idea: buy a dilapidated old boat to fix up and “eliminate the middle-man. ” A superb blend of relaxed slapstick and sophisticated visual humor, this short offers a concise assessment of the team’s comedic relationship when Ollie pauses during a breach of friendly relations to ask Stan, “Isn’t this silly? Here we are, two grown-up men, acting like a couple of children. ” Directed by George Marshall. With Billy Gilbert.

A pair of wannabe bandits join the service of a dashing nobleman secretly masquerading as Fra Diavolo, a notorious outlaw planning a jewel heist.

The Laurel and Hardy Show is a syndicated version of The Boys, which showcased collections of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's genius work.

After being robbed by a gang of outlaws, hapless Stan continues to cross paths with the bandits, who try to steal his inheritance out from under him.

A Laurel and Hardy World War II propaganda film aimed at comically demonstrating the uses of various wood-based products in the American economy.

In remaking the notoriously lost film Hats Off, the boys deliver a crated player piano to the home atop a steep hill. This film won the Academy Award® as “Best Short Subject, ” the first short ever to be so honored. Critics then and now have exhausted all superlatives in celebrating The Music Box. Laurel himself conferred his personal endorsement as the best picture the partnership produced. The Library of Congress enshrined the short on its National Film Registry deeming it to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant. ” The most famous, most askedabout shooting location in all Hal Roach comedies is the terraced staircase shown here. Official city street signs and an etched black marble plaque mark the site today in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles. Directed by James Parrott. With Billy Gilbert and Charlie Hall.

Three compilations of enduring comedy shorts from legendary silent film duo Laurel and Hardy plus selections from Max Davidson and Charley Chase.

A collection of the duo’s best colorized shorts including Night Owls and Alley Cats, The $125 Misunderstanding, A Dollar a Head, and many more.

See the classic comedy duo get into “another fine mess” in three hilarious shorts filled with baby hijinks, home disrepair, and ghostly mayhem!

An affectionate and appreciative look back at silent film comedies and thrillers from early the 20th century up through the 1920s.

An Iowa girl comes to Hollywood and achieves stardom with the help of a publicity man. Laurel and Hardy play themselves as actors on the set.