Although the title suggests an examination of the twisted obsessions of Ed Wood Jr., 'Angora Love' is in fact a Laurel & Hardy comedy, a diverting short which offers a heart-warming tale of two guys and the goat who refuses to leave them alone. Much of the humor revolves around the boys' efforts to hide the goat, Penelope by name, from their grouchy, goat-hating landlord, Edgar Kennedy, who gives one of his definitive grouch performances here. Apparently the premise held some special significance for Stan & Ollie, for they reworked it twice more with sound, first in the 1931 short Laughing Gravy, in which several of the gags from this film are re-enacted, and then just a year later in The Chimp, which borrows only the basic premise.
Angora Love, which was made in the spring of 1929 but not released until December of that year, was the last silent film made by Laurel & Hardy. It was originally accompanied by a music-and-effects track, but, contrary to an earlier post, there was never dialog on the soundtrack.
One of the best sequences occurs at the beginning, when the guys and the goat "meet cute." Penelope, having been fed a dough-nut by Stan, fixates on him and refuses to go away. Obviously, she wants more. The boys' attempt to give her the slip is funny and also rather poignant, at least from the goat's point of view. Cinematographer George Stevens helpfully offers us a tracking shot filmed from the goat's subjective P.O.V., or, as we might call it today, GoatCam. Once the trio is holed up in the boys' apartment the atmosphere gets somewhat claustrophobic, but the gags keep on coming. There's some silliness involving Stan's aerobics work-out, and a painful routine in which Ollie repeatedly steps on a tack. There's also an elaborately messy attempt to wash Penelope, and a sequence involving foot-rubbing which, despite the guys' innocent personalities, might strike some viewers as suggestively homo-erotic, or in any event kind of weird. There's also a quick throwaway gag involving a sailor and a prostitute that never would have gotten past the censors a few years later; it's understated but unmistakable, and not typical of Laurel & Hardy, but amusing in a raffish way.
In a sense it might have been more appropriate if Stan & Ollie had concluded their silent movie career on a spectacular note, perhaps with one of those rousing, garment-ripping riots that seemed to erupt so frequently in Culver City at the time. Still, while Angora Love is not one of the team's liveliest silent comedies, it did serve as a useful prototype for two of their talkies, and is plenty amusing in its own right.
