Right Again: a loving tribute to Stan, Ollie and Leo.

Wood, Robert Paul

During my childhood, in England in the 1930s and into the 40s, movie theatre programmes typically consisted of: a main feature (or 'A' movie), a second feature ('B' movie), a newsreel, and, quite often, a Laurel & Hardy short. The moment their signature tune (commonly known as 'I'm cuckoo, you're cuckoo ...') came on, the older family member(s) accompanying me emitted loud groans. But I loved Stan and Ollie, and refused to be influenced by my older siblings' contempt (which today looks more like culpable ignorance). I far preferred them to Chaplin (I didn't discover Keaton until much later). Surprisingly perhaps, time has only confirmed this preference. I have always had problems with Chaplin. While I have learnt to admire the skills, he has almost never made me laugh. I think what gets in the way is the selfconsciousness, the narcissism: the way in which every gesture seems to say 'Look at this, isn't it amazing?'. L & H understood their place and function, as humble entertainers, programme-fillers. They never told me I had to love and admire them. I didn't need to be told.

I don't think I grasped that a film had a director until 1938/9, my annus mirabilis, the year I look back on as the genesis of my career as a film critic (I was eight years old): the year I first saw The Lady Vanishes and Stagecoach, when the names of Hitchcock and Ford were on every filmgoer's lips. (It was also the year of Only Angels Have Wings, but my mother decreed that it wasn't 'suitable', on what grounds I know not, so Hawks had to wait). But it was a great many years before I became aware of Leo McCarey, and even more before I fully recognized his importance in Stan and Ollie's joint career. He was 'Supervisory Manager' on most or all of their films during their richest and most prolific period (1928-1930), during which they made thirty short features, and he personally directed three of them. As Supervisory Manager he worked with them on their scripts, encouraging them to go further, developing gags and routines: a fine example of the communal art of Hollywood's great period, and to my mind a further reason for preferring them to Chaplin, who wrote and directed his own films apparently without help or interference, hence with no checks on his egocentricity. The richest periods of art (the Renaissance, the Elizabethan theatre, the Vienna of Mozart) have always been communal in this sense, as against the loneliness of the modern auteur. Wouldn't the careers of Fellini, Antonioni and Bergman have been richer for more communality--not merely immediate collaborators such as screenwriters, but the availability of genres, conventions, formulas such as sustained and nurtured Shakespeare--who invented none of his plots (with the possible exception of one of his worst plays) nor blank verse? McCarey remains, even today, one of Hollywood's most underrated directors, perhaps because he disgraced himself by 'naming names' for HUAC (but at least he did it out of personal, if misguided, conviction, not to further his career like Kazan and others--the director of Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary's had little to fear), perhaps because he is associated primarily (and correctly) with comedy. But my personal list of the 25 greatest Hollywood films would surely include Ruggles of Red Gap, The Awful Truth, Make Way for Tomorrow and Rally 'Round the Flag, Boys.

Of the three films that McCarey directed personally (We Faw Down, Liberty, Wrong Again), the first is (aside from its famous and often quoted last shot) little known but a treasure in itself, its neglect accounted for perhaps by its lack of startling images, its domestic settings. The second is generally celebrated partly for its audacious though quite 'innocent' hints of gay sex in public places, but more for its prolonged and terrifying acrobatics on vertiginous scaffolding (of which I must confess I tire rather easily). The third is a strong candidate for their greatest short. We have often been told that French Surrealism derived inspiration from silent American comedy, and surely Wrong Again must be among the prime examples. The broken, hastily reassembled statue of a female nude, the buttocks now pointing forwards, would surely have delighted the makers of L'Age d'Or. But even more remarkable is the white horse on a damaged grand piano supported by Ollie's head replacing one of the legs, the long-held take looking appallingly and agonizingly real. Take away the humour and you have an image that Bunuel and Dali could scarcely have improved upon.

NOTE: Anyone who writes about Laurel and Hardy owes a great debt to Charles Barr's brilliant book on them, among my favourite works of film criticism, to which I return repeatedly.