Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy

Rating:
Summary: The Definitive Laurel and Hardy Biography
Review: Author Simon Louvish has written insightful critical biographies on comic legends such as W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers. However, this affectionate study on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy ranks as his finest achievement to date. "Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy" adds new depth and poignancy to the team's life and work. Some of Louvish's opinions are not necessarily mine (he seems a bit harsh on "Babes in Toyland" and "The Flying Deuces"), yet he has a firm grasp of Stan and Ollie's modus operandi -- as well as the circumstances that hastened the duo's creative decline after leaving Hal Roach Studios in 1940. At 520 pages, "Stan and Ollie" is exhaustively researched and always engaging.

Rating:
Summary: Big Business & Big Fun
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. I also enjoyed Louvish's books on W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.

What I liked about this book was that it placed Laurel and Hardy in a working context. The impression I got was that they were not totally responsible for their success. They needed a team of other performers (Edgar Kennedy, James Finlayson) and behind the camera people (Hal Roach, Leo McCary, the Parrott brothers) to create the comedy gems that we enjoy. (I found that Louvish's judgments on what the best L & H films pretty much tallied up with mine.) When the equation began to change, such as Roach getting mad at the duo after "Babes in Toyland" and gradually losing interest in their careers, the films ceased being as interesting.

I found this a refreshing approach to the material, which too often is "Comedian X was a true genius and everyone else messed with his vision." Louvish's book presents a picture of the lives of the two comedians, but also shows how their films were a collaborative process.

Rating:
Summary: Big Business & Big Fun
Review: I enjoyed this book very much. I also enjoyed Louvish's books on W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers.

What I liked about this book was that it placed Laurel and Hardy in a working context. The impression I got was that they were not totally responsible for their success. They needed a team of other performers (Edgar Kennedy, James Finlayson) and behind the camera people (Hal Roach, Leo McCary, the Parrott brothers) to create the comedy gems that we enjoy. (I found that Louvish's judgments on what the best L & H films pretty much tallied up with mine.) When the equation began to change, such as Roach getting mad at the duo after "Babes in Toyland" and gradually losing interest in their careers, the films ceased being as interesting.

I found this a refreshing approach to the material, which too often is "Comedian X was a true genius and everyone else messed with his vision." Louvish's book presents a picture of the lives of the two comedians, but also shows how their films were a collaborative process.

Rating:
Summary: Once again, bad writing defeats good research.
Review: Just as he did with Monkey Business, his biography of the Marx Bros, Simon Louvish once again defeats his excellent research skills with his horribly corny and dated writing style.

Louvish's efforts to be as clever and funny as his subjects are embarrassing; good writing doesn't need to call attention to itself. Every page bristles with old medicine bottle sentences like, " To Stan, of course, art was not the issue so much as work and the remuneration therof," or, "This fact alone should provide a vital clue for the constant conundrum - the disentangling of the claims of authorship to Laurel and Hardy, the characters, the lines, the movies, the plots."

Editor!

Of course, any book with TWO subtitles is suspect. Louvish should stick to his terrific detective skills (and they are truly impressive) and get some talented grad student to do the writng.

To see what a good showbiz bio is like - well researched AND well written - check out "W.C. Fields: A Biography, " by James Curtis.

Rating:
Summary: The Comic Duo for All Time
Review: Laurel and Hardy are not mean to each other, like Abbott was to the unfortunate Costello, and neither would conspire to seduce away a pretty girl from the other, like Hope and Crosby did. They didn't get mawkish or act as spokesmen for the downtrodden, as Chaplin did. On screen (and, let us be grateful, off screen, as well) they were friends. They may have dumped paint buckets over one another's heads or sat on one another's hats, and they caused an enormous amount of set destruction wherever they went, but there was kindness and caring between them. A fine, big dual biography now places the two within cinema and world and comedic history, _Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy_ (Thomas Dunn Books) by Simon Louvish. The author, who has done previous biographies of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, has an intellectual appreciation for Laurel and Hardy films, but his book is relatively free of theorizing about what made the pair such classics. He has not forgotten the main virtue of the team: they are funny.

Laurel was born in Lancashire in 1890, of a theatrical family. His father was a minor stage star and author of some literally melodramatic plays (and though he turned out proud of Laurel's success and fame, never really took pride that it was done outside of the legitimate theater). He came to America with the same troupe that brought Chaplin. Hardy was a southerner from Georgia. He was fat all through his life, and like so many "different" kids, he learned to be entertaining as a way of diverting others from mocking him. He was a gifted singer, and would sing in the theater, his theater when he ran a small-town movie house. It was his entrance into show business. The two performed in a film together in 1921, but didn't become a team until 1927. Unlike many silent film performers, they had little difficulty making the transition to sound. They were lucky to have as a frequent director the great Leo McCarey, and Louvish pays compliments to the straight men who played with them, like James Finlayson and Edgar Kennedy. When the depression came, their roles as forgotten men who were ready to take on any work that came their way easily caught the mood of the time. The splendid _The Music Box_ of 1932 was a version of the Sisyphus myth, with "The Laurel and Hardy Transfer Company - Foundered 1931") trying to deliver a crated player piano up a ridiculously steep set of outdoor steps.

The friendship of Laurel and Hardy is the theme of all their films, and Louvish takes us through all the major ones. They are childish men in many ways, and they damage each other's pride and step on each other's toes repeatedly, but the friendship always works and continues beyond every exasperation. "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into" is known as their tag line, but the plaintive "Why don't you do something to _help_ me?" means much more, even though the help might have turned out to be much worse than no help at all. Louvish gives us plenty of details of the lives of these unforgettable clowns, and it has to be said that their off-screen lives were pretty ordinary. Perhaps Hardy was right, for instance, when he modestly said, "There's very little to write about me. I didn't do very much outside of doing a lot of gags before the camera and playing golf the rest of the day." But Louvish shows that those gags before the camera, and the friendship on screen and off, have made Laurel and Hardy far more than just geniuses of slapstick.

Rating:
Summary: The Comic Duo for All Time
Review: Laurel and Hardy are not mean to each other, like Abbott was to the unfortunate Costello, and neither would conspire to seduce away a pretty girl from the other, like Hope and Crosby did. They didn't get mawkish or act as spokesmen for the downtrodden, as Chaplin did. On screen (and, let us be grateful, off screen, as well) they were friends. They may have dumped paint buckets over one another's heads or sat on one another's hats, and they caused an enormous amount of set destruction wherever they went, but there was kindness and caring between them. A fine, big dual biography now places the two within cinema and world and comedic history, _Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy_ (Thomas Dunn Books) by Simon Louvish. The author, who has done previous biographies of W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers, has an intellectual appreciation for Laurel and Hardy films, but his book is relatively free of theorizing about what made the pair such classics. He has not forgotten the main virtue of the team: they are funny.

Laurel was born in Lancashire in 1890, of a theatrical family. His father was a minor stage star and author of some literally melodramatic plays (and though he turned out proud of Laurel's success and fame, never really took pride that it was done outside of the legitimate theater). He came to America with the same troupe that brought Chaplin. Hardy was a southerner from Georgia. He was fat all through his life, and like so many "different" kids, he learned to be entertaining as a way of diverting others from mocking him. He was a gifted singer, and would sing in the theater, his theater when he ran a small-town movie house. It was his entrance into show business. The two performed in a film together in 1921, but didn't become a team until 1927. Unlike many silent film performers, they had little difficulty making the transition to sound. They were lucky to have as a frequent director the great Leo McCarey, and Louvish pays compliments to the straight men who played with them, like James Finlayson and Edgar Kennedy. When the depression came, their roles as forgotten men who were ready to take on any work that came their way easily caught the mood of the time. The splendid _The Music Box_ of 1932 was a version of the Sisyphus myth, with "The Laurel and Hardy Transfer Company - Foundered 1931") trying to deliver a crated player piano up a ridiculously steep set of outdoor steps.

The friendship of Laurel and Hardy is the theme of all their films, and Louvish takes us through all the major ones. They are childish men in many ways, and they damage each other's pride and step on each other's toes repeatedly, but the friendship always works and continues beyond every exasperation. "Here's another fine mess you've gotten me into" is known as their tag line, but the plaintive "Why don't you do something to _help_ me?" means much more, even though the help might have turned out to be much worse than no help at all. Louvish gives us plenty of details of the lives of these unforgettable clowns, and it has to be said that their off-screen lives were pretty ordinary. Perhaps Hardy was right, for instance, when he modestly said, "There's very little to write about me. I didn't do very much outside of doing a lot of gags before the camera and playing golf the rest of the day." But Louvish shows that those gags before the camera, and the friendship on screen and off, have made Laurel and Hardy far more than just geniuses of slapstick.

Rating:
Summary: As much as mystery as the the subjects themselves
Review: One-third of the way through this book, I believed I was reading the most well-written book I had ever read. The style of Mr. Louvish did not seem to be prose as much as an extended conversation with the author. A conversation about two people about whom the overwhelming majority of us know only what we've seen in the movies.

My view of this book changed rarher abruply just as success came to two men who had worked in the film industry for the better part of a decade as solo performers. At this point, the success of the team and the success of this book intersected while going in opposite directions.

Stan and Ollie is another in what appears to be an ongoing historical series on the early comedians of film. In addtion to his published works on Fields and the Marx Brothers - and his soon-to-be-published book on Sennett - Louvish also provides a great deal of information on those with whom Laurel and Hardy worked.

But, this ominbus volume has its flaws. I'm not speaking about the various minor to the story-at-hand-inaccuracies (Lindbergh flring the Atlantic in 1928, for example), but rather the seeming breakdown of the narrative at the key points.

Although there is a massive amount of data here, Louvish seems unable to reach conclusions about why things happened. The most specific examp[le of this is related to the two men getting together. Louvish swamps us with detail of their solo films. He acts like the notional Greek Choir in commenting on their brushes with each other on a few films; these he seems to relegate to the "oops...almost but not quite" conclusion. He even manages to belabor the point of "what was the first Laurel and Hardy film?" to extinction in quibble over whether the full and correct Stan and Ollie personsas were in place.And, if this isn't enough, there is page after page of what is nothing more than descriptions of the plots of their films.

You never really learn wht they could work together so well. Louvish seems to imply that their characters worked that out while their true selves just sort of watched from the wings.

There is still a lot of information here about the team and the period. It seves to confirm the fact that Hollywood has more in common with the mutually assured destruction theory of the Cold War than the place where dreams come true.

Rating:
Summary: A nice mess, but still a bit of a mess
Review: Simon Louvish's epic-length biography Stan and Ollie plays like one of those Laurel & Hardy comedies that were padded to feature-length by the inclusion of romantic leads nobody cares about. Like those movies, one has to wade through a lot of guff to get to the really good stuff.

Louvish has done his research (as he all too eager to convince the reader), and it pays off most admirably when debunking previous tales of the Laurel & Hardy history. The most compelling example is the chapter detailing Oliver Hardy's first marriage. Hardy and film historians have long maintained that he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to pursue a film career, and there was where he met and married first wife Madelyn. Louvish detailingly reveals that Madelyn was in fact Jewish, that Hardy met her in Georgia at the time of an infamous Jewish lynching, and that Hardy and his wife exited Georgia as a result, never to return.

Such dramatic payoffs are alone worth the price of the book. Louvish also often gleans much enlightened insight into Laurel & Hardy's film work (as well he should--Louvish in a part-time film teacher). To cite just one example, his analysis of the finale of L&H's penultimate Hal Roach film A Chump at Oxford is as insightful and moving as the finale itself.

Along the way, though, the reader must endure the obstacle courses that plagued Louvish's previous bios of W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers (both of which tomes are shamelessly plugged throughout this book). For one thing, Louvish lards his writing with enough precious verbosity to make L&H biographer John McCabe look like an illiterate slacker by comparison. (Prime example: "Babe's inner life has always been a...mystery wrapped in an enigma, hidden behind those folds of flesh.")

My final complaint with the book is that when it gets into Laurel & Hardy at their prime, it quotes other, far superior sources (most notably Randy Skretvedt's) to the point of [being word for word]. And even then, accuracy is not Louvish's strong suit. Louvish quotes a Skretvedt interview with Hal Roach in which Roach, by way of contrasting L&H with other comedy teams, states that "Abbott and Costello worked at our studio, and they used to fight like hell. But with Laurel and Hardy, when I fired Hardy, Laurel cried." This quote has almost as many errors as it has words: A&C never worked for Roach, and Roach never fired Hardy (Roach had Stan and Babe on concurrent, separate contracts and often suspended Laurel or let his contract lapse during certain disputes).

For all of its faults, Louvish's genuine appreciation for Laurel and Hardy's comic artistry makes a considerable amount of Stan and Ollie worthwhile writing for the fervent L&H buff. Just make to sure to avoid Louvish's verbal land mines in order to reach the real meat of the book

Rating:
Summary: The Double Life Of Laurel & Hardy
Review: That's the subtitle of Simon Louvish's new book on the famous comedy duo and it's perfect. It implies something down and dirty like so many celebrity bios cranked out since MOMMIE DEAREST but is in fact a clever play on words in the tradition of Stan Laurel (it refers to the two lives of its subjects rather than a Jekyll/Hyde personality). There are numerous books on L&H but none have gone into the background of both men with such depth before showing us how they became who they became. Oliver Hardy's background in particular is especially fascinating as so little of it has been known up until now. The book strikes a good balance between telling us about their private trials and tribulations and describing virtually all of their cinematic efforts from early solo two reelers to their coming together through the final sad phase of WWII features at M-G-M and Twentieth Century-Fox. Louvish doesn't fail to present his subjects warts and all but he treats them with compassion. He does not judge them. The prologue on the evolution of comedy is also a big plus as it helps to show how comedy and the clowns who create it play such an important part in our lives and to explain why Laurel & Hardy and others like them are still as popular today as when they first appeared. This is the first of Louvish's books that I have read and having done that I can't wait to read his others on W.C. Fields and the Marx Brothers. An absolute must not only for fans of L&H but also for anyone interested in the nature of comedy and what it takes to create it.

Rating:
Summary: Stan and Ollie
Review: This books is a complete and very detailed account of the films of Laurel and Hardy, two of the most famous comedians of their time. It begins with biographical sketches of both of them from their birth, and this is interwoven with a history of all the comedy films made from the silent days until Laurel and Hardy are eventually paired together in 1927. After that, it is a complete filmography of all their films, supporting actors in their films, their contemporaries like Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon and Buster Keaton, their directors, etc. Of greater interest to me was the biographical information on the two comedians whose personal lives were marked by enough marital misadventures to be the subject of one of their famous two-reelers. Laurel had four wives and eight marriages; he married one wife three times. Just like in their movies, Laurel and Hardy were friends to the end.