Duck Soup

This is the first short in which Laurel and Hardy worked together as a team. They were not called 'Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy' but have fictitious names. And Hardy has a two day growth of stubble. Nevertheless, this one is loaded with some very funny sight gags (this being the silent era) and ranks among their funniest films.

Forest Rangers are recruiting volunteers and have been given permission to press into service vagrants found in the LA area. Our heroes fall into that category in this short and do all they can to avoid the Rangers. They come upon an unoccupied mansion and hide inside - until a couple who rented it show up at the front door. Things begin to unravel for the boys in predictable fashion, making it one of their best. It played at Capitolfest, Rome NY, 8/14/21.

******** 8/10 - Website no longer prints my star rating.

Duck Soup (1927)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Laurel and Hardy, trying to get away from firemen wanting to recruit them, run and hide in a house but when someone shows up to rent it they must pretend to be the owner and maid. L&H went onto remake this with better results in Another Fine Mess but this short has a few funny moments but not enough to make it work throughout.

45 Minutes from Hollywood (1926)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

A country boy goes to Hollywood to pay a bill and gets caught up in what he thinks is a movie being made. What he doesn't know is that he's caught up in a real robbery. There are a few good gags here but the real highlight is Oliver Hardy playing the Hotel Detective. Stan Laurel has a brief role as well. This was the first Hal Roach film where the two were in the same movie, although they don't share any scenes here.

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in lengthy scenes together for the first time in March 1927's "Duck Soup" (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers' 1933 film of the same name). Even though they appear on a park bench and go about escaping from the forestry rangers conscripting the unemployed to fight nearby fires, Stan and Laurel dress like tramps, with Hardy unshaven and wearing a monocle and a top hat. This was the first movie, however, that McCarey saw the potential of the two as a comedy team. Despite finding themselves in the same locations and situations, the two act more as individuals then they do playing off one another in "Duck Soup"-lingo for "Easy as pie" and "As good as done."

After "Duck Soup," Laurel and Hardy appeared in their next seven movies together, but each playing different characters from the other, even though they did interact.

Besides being very funny, the silent film 'Duck Soup' is a vitally important link in the evolution of Laurel and Hardy as a comedy team. This movie was based on a music-hall sketch written by Stan Laurel's father, Arthur Jefferson, a successful theatre manager in northern England who resented his son's attempts to become a stage comedian. Laurel and Hardy made 'Duck Soup' at a point when they were already established as a team but were still developing the 'Stan' and 'Oliie' characters that would soon become so popular and beloved. By this time, Oliver Hardy had already got his fastidious little moustache, but in 'Duck Soup' he also has a considerable amount of beard stubble which makes him look quite jowly. 'Duck Soup' was remade only three years later as 'Another Fine Mess'.

'Duck Soup' was a lost film for more than 50 years: in the early 1980s, a print turned up in Belgium. The original silent-film intertitles had been cut out and replaced with French titles. Also, one insert shot of a newspaper article had been cut out and a French translation spliced in. The prints which are currently available feature English-language titles which are blatantly translations of the French titles, and this brings a jarring touch: Laurel keeps addressing Hardy as 'sir', which doesn't really fit the relationship between their characters.

The missing shot of the newspaper article has been replaced (in 1982) with a modern mock-up, and this provides an unintentional laugh. While Hardy reads the newspaper article in 1927, we can see the article directly underneath it... which is all about John DeLorean getting arrested for financial misdeeds in 1982! Oo-er!

In 'Duck Soup', Laurel and Hardy are tramps who discover that a local forest fire has made things hot for them: forest rangers are conscripting all the local indigent men for firefighting duty. Fleeing from the rangers, the two pals end up sharing a bicycle at the top of a steep hill, with disastrously funny results.

Still hiding from the rangers, they end up inside the swank house of Colonel Blood, who is currently away ... but Lord and Lady Plumtree have arrived to rent the house in the colonel's absence. Hardy disguises himself as the colonel, pressing Laurel into service to masquerade as the maid! Stan Laurel was a gifted female impersonator: one of the very few male performers who could convincingly portray a woman and be funny at the same time. His drag turn as the maid here is astonishing and funny.

The ending of this movie is quite different from the ending of the remake 'Another Fine Mess'. Laurel and Hardy would occasionally end a film with an impossible gag, and they use one here.

Is Laurel and Hardy's "Duck Soup" any relation to the Marx Brothers' movie "Duck Soup:"? Yes, indeed! Leo McCarey was an assistant director on this movie. Six years later, when he directed the Marxes in what would become their greatest and funniest film, McCarey decided to recycle the title from this earlier film. The talkie revolution had changed Hollywood so utterly that silent movies made only a few years earlier were regarded as obsolete and unfit for re-release ... so McCarey figured he had a free hand to re-use the title, and this silent movie vanished into oblivion for more than half a century. Fortunately, 'Duck Soup' is now available again, and it's very funny. I'll rate this movie 8 points out of 10.

While it's not one of the funniest Laurel & Hardy comedies, "Duck Soup" is still worth seeing. It is at least fairly amusing, and at times quite funny, besides its greater historical significance. The story and some of the gags both allow you to see the beginnings of the "Stan and Ollie" personas that the comic duo would later refine and perfect.

In this short, the humor mostly comes from the ways that they work together, and from the silly predicaments in which the boys find themselves, rather than from any of the specific gags. Most of the gags do work all right, but they are not as imaginative or as creative as the kinds of routines that Laurel and Hardy did in later features. The basic situation is funny, and it creates some good possibilities, some of which are used well. After they had a little more experience with each other, they learned how to take this kind of setup and make it even funnier.

Overall, this movie is probably going to be of interest mostly to those who are already Laurel & Hardy fans, who will certainly find this an interesting look at their early days together. In itself it has some good moments of comedy as well.