Charlie Hall

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.

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.

Two college freshmen pull a "Turkey Dump" and break up with their high school sweethearts over "Drunksgiving" - the one chaotic night before Thanksgiving in their hometown that puts their codependent friendship to the test.

In their final two-reel comedy, Stan is a boarder, renting a room from Ollie and his wife. On their way to making a furniture payment, the fellows are lured into an auction and wind up purchasing a grandfather clock. The fine optical work by Roy Seawright allowing the actors to literally grab and pull succeeding scenes into view (via so-called “wipes”) is a unique cinematic gag and aids the pacing. Escorted to the set every day by Hal Roach’s father, Charles, who actually lived on the lot, was a visitor from England named A. J. Jefferson, watching his “boy, ” Stan Laurel, perform before movie cameras for the first time. Directed by James W. Horne. With Daphne Pollard and James Finlayson.

Ready to leave for his wedding, Mr. Hardy is distracted when best man Mr. Laurel arrives with his gift — a jigsaw puzzle. Merchandising stills shot during the production of PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES showed Laurel & Hardy trying to assemble a studio-licensed jigsaw puzzle and could well have been the genesis of this entertaining comedy. Directed by Charley Rogers and Lloyd French. With James Finlayson and Frank Terry, aka Nat Clifford, as both the butler and radio announcer. Also a gag writer at the studio, Terry wrote the title tune for SONS OF THE DESERT.