With the help of Bernard Delfont (a lively Jones giving the film’s most robust performance), Stanley Laurel (Coogan) and Oliver Hardy (Reilly) embark on a music hall revival tour – fitting because those are the venues in which they sowed the seeds of their careers – throughout the UK. This bit of backstory (horror-esque, with Huston’s Hal Roach looming like the devil) is important because the focus of all tension and resolution is on Stan’s long-simmering resentment about that one time Ollie made a movie without him (1939’s Zenobia), which Ollie chalks up to contractual obligations. The film largely takes place in 1953 – aside from a few sloppily inserted but necessary scenes on a studio backlot in 1937 while the team was filming Way Out West. In fact, it’s pretty inside baseball, with biographical hints dropped like breadcrumbs for either the astute viewer or the casual cinephile to gobble up.ĭick Van Dyke, appearing in the 1974 BBC TV documentary Cuckoo (which is excellent, available on YouTube, and highly recommended viewing if you’re planning to see this film), called Laurel & Hardy “the greatest love story of all time.” By the Fifties, the two of them were the proverbial has-beens, long thought to have retired, undone by boozing, betting on horses, and women (they each had several failed marriages). Baird’s new film (indicated by the title itself, forgoing the more easily recognizable monikers).
The golden era Hollywood comedy duo Laurel & Hardy are certainly not getting the step-by-step biopic treatment in Jon S.
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