I guess one of the advantages of being a filmmaker with some degree of clout is you can take your regular-ass childhood and turn it into a movie as if it was somehow special. And it seems Laurel and Hardy aren’t to mine.
Well, there’s your answer, I guess: it’s all a matter of taste. But I don’t find that to be the case with silent comedians -who were equally, if not even more, popular, and whose work is even older - nor with things like the Road to films - which are far from the height of sophisticated comedy, but tickle my fancy more often.
it’s been imitated and copied for decades, and we’ve moved on. Some might say this is the downside of the duo being popular and their work being old - i.e. And yet the other does exactly that, because that’s the level most of the film’s humour operates at. “How anyone could be so stupid as to stand there and continually bump their head is beyond me,” one of them says at one point. The humour operates at a basic level, with gags that are either well-worn or repetitious. Here’s the rub: it’s a comedy, but it barely made me laugh. Leaving the quality of the print aside (it was poor but at least it wasn’t cut, which apparently many are), I can’t say I was too impressed by the quality of the content, either.
Certainly, it’s the one you see bandied about the most but then it’s in the public domain (one of only two Laurel & Hardy films where that’s the case), so it’s inevitably subject to endless cheapo releases. The Flying Deuces is “probably their most famous film”, at least according to the blurb on my copy. But I don’t think I’ve ever actively seen any of their work certainly none of their feature-length films. I feel like I’m aware of Laurel & Hardy in a way I would say “everyone” is, but I guess that’s probably not true anymore (the kind of stuff I picked up or learnt about by osmosis in my ’80s/’90s childhood is surely very different to what kids got growing up in the ’00s/’10s).
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