The Lost Films of Laurel & Hardy: The Complete Collection, Vol. 8

Description

Mastered from the original 35mm material, this eighth volume of lost films from the great comedy team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy includes all silent shorts: "Two Tars" (1928, 21 min.), "The Second Hundred Years" (1927, 22 min.), "Slipping Wives" (1926, 23 min.), "From Soup to Nuts" (1928, 22 min.), plus the Stan Laurel solo shorts "Scorching Sands" (1923, 15 min.) and "Should Tall Men Marry?" (1927, 19 min., color tinted).

Customer Reviews:

Very enjoyable Laurel and Hardy silents.......2007-04-18

The above-average Volume Eight of THE LOST [SILENT] FILMS OF LAUREL AND HARDY has two of the funniest shorts the men ever made, TWO TARS and FROM SOUP TO NUTS (both 1928). In TWO TARS, they play two sailors out for a Sunday drive with two pretty women. They get involved in the greatest and funniest traffic jam in movie history, with everyone tearing apart pieces of everyone else's car. And FROM SOUP TO NUTS has Laurel and Hardy as klutzy waiters for a fancy mansion dinner, with hilarious results. Watch Stan serve lettuce in woolen underwear when told to serve the salad undressed. And watch how many times Ollie can trip, fall face first into a cake, and still make it funny. Both of these incomparable comedies have been mastered from the original nitrate camera negative from Hal Roach Studios.

I wish the other four shorts on Volume Eight were this stupendous; they are enjoyable and at least look great, masterered from 35mm camera negatives and with wonderful Jazz Age scores. In THE SECOND HUNDRED YEARS (1927), Stan and Ollie are convicts who escape from prison masquerading as painters who somehow end up pretending to be high society servants--before their French police hosts want to see the prison the boys have escaped from!

SLIPPED WIVES (also 1927) stars long-forgotten Priscilla Dean as a bored rich woman who hires Stan to make love to her to make her bored husband jealous. Hardy is a butler.

SCORCHING SANDS (1923), the weakest short in this set, is a one reel comedy with Laurel alone doing a parody of French Foreign Legion adventures. It somehow is not as funny for me as it should be. Maybe if I saw it with an audience.

Same with SHOULD TALL MEN MARRY (again 1927). The tinted archive print could not be more beautiful and the music score is wonderful. But the writing is lacking. In his last solo outing without Hardy, Laurel is working on a ranch with Jimmy Finlayson, his daughter Martha Sleeper, and a stubborn mule. Bad guys steal the daughter; Laurel and Finlayson rescue her. The movie is important because from now on every single film Stan made would have him starring as a team with "Babe" Hardy. But it isn't a very good movie for me. Again, maybe an art theatre audience would make it come alive.

The total running time for this volume is 119 minutes.

A piece of happiness.......2007-01-05

Every piece of those two guys work is only pleasure. I discovered them when I was 5 and now, more than 50 years later, they still make me laugh like a child.

Silent Classics From Stan and Ollie.......2006-05-19

A trio of classic Laurel and Hardy two-reelers highlight Volume 8 in "The Lost Films" series. "Two Tars" (1928), "The Second Hundred Years" (1927) and "From Soup to Nuts" (1928) remain masterpieces of comic invention and timing. The 35mm prints are very good, but the public-domain musical accompaniment becomes terribly repetitive. The remaining shorts in this collection -- the embryonic "Slipping Wives" (1926) and two Laurel solo efforts, "Scorching Sands" (1923) and "Should Tall Men Marry?" (1927) -- are worth seeing only from an academic standpoint. Hopefully, this series will be reissued with stronger music tracks while focusing solely on genuine L&H films.

Best in Series.......2005-06-16

This volume is one of the best of the "lost silent films" collection, comprised of three solid performances from 1928 that illustrate the diversity and sophistication of Laurel and Hardy's comic style. Two Tars implements the vintage L&H formula of orchestrated chaos (repeated in Your Darn Tootin, Big Business, and many other films) to perfection. Two Tars has an appealing breeziness that results from the story's premise: the boys are seamen on leave egged on to perform "senseless acts of violence" by two delectable flappers, inflicted on cars stranded in a traffic jam. The wave of destruction builds to a crescendo of twisted metal until the boys are exposed as the perpetrators, and a short chase ends the film.

The Second Hundred Years, by contrast, has a comic formula that explores fertile new ground for the duo's humor. They are prisoners (shaved heads and all) who through their incompetence can't quite adjust to prison routine. They pull off not one but two disguises, one as painters in order to escape prison, the other as French officials inspecting the very prison they have recently escaped from! The best scene is their attempt to convince a suspicious cop that they are real painters by literally "painting the town" -- including cars, street lamps, and a flapper's derriere. The ballet-like grace with which Oliver Hardy, especially, tries unsuccessfully to imitate a professional painter is priceless. Rotund Hardy has clearly learned from Fatty Arbuckle's ability to mine comic moments from being dexterous in spite of his girth. One leaves this film with the sense that the rich comic situations here could have been developed further, and indeed the basic structure of the film was repeated later in Pardon Us (1931) expanded into a feature length film.

From Soup to Nuts is the weakest of the three, but still entertaining, as the boys are hired by a "nouveau riche" family to serve dinner to a collection of distinguished friends. Most of the happenings are funny because of their predictability -- laws of nature dictate that when Hardy carries a large cake to a dining room, he must somehow fall into it, and the laws of nature are confirmed repeatedly here. The film also contains the popular and voluptuous L&H supporting case member Anita Garvin who performs the same gag with an uncooperative cherry that Laurel does in Second Hundred years.

Each volume in the series contains additional short films either by Laurel or Hardy alone, or by other comics in the Hal Roach factory, and this volume is no exception. These films tend to be at best of purely of historical interest to L&H fans, and at worst, worthless filler. But overall this volume in the series is one of the best.

Contains some of their funniest.......2005-03-26

This disc showcases some of Laurel and Hardy's funniest and best silent shorts, and I also found there was more variety in the backing music than in some of the other discs in this series. 'From Soup to Nuts' is hands-down the best and funniest one on here, their funniest silent short I've seen so far. Part of what makes their sound shorts so funny is the fact that their voices just totally matched their personalities and physical appearance, adding to already funny situations, but in 'From Soup to Nuts' the gags and situations are so hilarious they don't even need speech to add to the hilarity. 'Two Tars' and 'The Second Hundred Years' are also hilarious and classic, very strong material. The fourth L&H short on here, 'Slipping Wives,' features them together but not really a proper team, though they have more interaction here than in some of their other shorts where they appeared together before being officially teamed. That one is also very strong and funny. Of the two Stan solo shorts featured, 'Under Two Jags' (which admittedly might be a mislabeling of a different film, 'Scorching Sands') is the stronger and funnier, despite the fact that there's not a single intertitle besides the introductory one. In my opinion the weakest one is Stan's final solo short, 'Should Tall Men Marry?' It's well-written and well-acted enough, but just not as interesting, funny, or solid as the other five.

DVD:

DVD

DVD