STACK #123 Jan 2015

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approached again, this time by Universal Pictures, for whom he made four films. For the next few years, Stan jumped between travelling the country with his vaudeville act and making two reel comedy shorts for various nondescript Hollywood studios. Unlike the successful comedy movie star characters such as Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke, Roscoe Arbuckle’s Fatty and Buster Keaton’s Stoneface, Stan struggled to create a distinctive comedic character that audiences could identify with; his early spasmodic career in movies was, frankly, not very funny. In late 1919, again finding himself in Los Angeles for yet another vaudeville run, Stan got a call from film producer G.M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson. Anderson was a motion picture pioneer and the very first cowboy star appearing in Edwin S. Porter’s famous silent movie The Great Train Robbery (1903). He made hundreds of two-reel westerns and then retired from the screen to produce films for Metro Pictures. His offer to Stan was to star in a film where he would play a young gentleman about town who is falsely accused of dog-napping. The film was titled The Lucky Dog (released in 1921). Unbeknownst to Stan at the time, the character actor who played the dastardly villain in the film would have a life changing effect on him, although they wouldn’t appear onscreen together for another seven years. That actor’s name was Oliver “Babe” Hardy.

Continued...

rise as a movie star. With their star player gone, vaudeville bookings dried up, and six months later, the remaining Karno group called it a day and made arrangements to return to England. But Stan and two other members from the now disbanded Karno Company decided to stay in the States and try to break into vaudeville with an act they called The Three Comiques. Stan wrote a number of sketches for the trio and managed to get them booked into a theatre in Chicago, but they were out of work more weeks than were in it. By 1915, Stan had renamed the group The Keystone Trio, cleverly impersonating

Vaudevillian Stan Laurel

The Stan and Mae Laurel duo

second rate theatres to major theatrical reviews. Whilst appearing at the Hippodrome in Los Angeles, Stan was approached backstage by a Hollywood talent scout and asked if he would be interested in making a series of comedy films. He

Unbeknownst to Stan at the time, the character actor who played the dastardly villain in [The Lucky Dog] would have a life changing effect on him, although they wouldn’t appear onscreen together for another seven years. That actor’s name was Oliver “Babe” Hardy.

the characters of Charlie Chaplin, Chester Conklin and Mabel Normand, who by now were extremely popular Keystone movie stars. This Chaplinesque act finally secured them more regular vaudeville bookings. However, early in 1917, following a bust up with his two former colleagues, Stan separated from them and formed a duo with Australian dancer Mae Dahlbergh. This change of partner also brought about a name change, and the duo hit the vaudeville circuit as Stan and Mae Laurel (this new name of Laurel was adopted from a favourite picture in a book owned by Mae, depicting a laurel tree). The couple’s relationship both on and off the stage was tempestuous, with Mae being quite handy with her fists. Stan would often have to apply copious amounts of makeup to disguise his bruised and black eyes before taking to the stage, and quickly earned a reputation as a hen- pecked lover. (He would later put this experience to good use in the many Laurel and Hardy scripts he would write, where both he and Hardy played weak, frightened, hen-pecked husbands.) Adapting an old Karno sketch concerning a burglar and a girl with a toothache, Stan and Mae’s act proved popular with vaudeville audiences, which quickly elevated them from

eagerly accepted the offer and two days later had shot his first motion picture, Nuts in May (1917), which featured him as an asylum inmate who believes he is Napoleon Bonaparte. However, the obscure film production company failed to raise the cash to continue the series and Stan returned to the stage. But a week later he was

To be continued...

The first movie appearance of Stan Laurel and Babe Hardy, together in The Lucky Dog (1921)

JANUARY 2015 JB Hi-Fi www.jbhifi.com.au

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