Two Tars

Laurel and Hardy would only make seven more silent films before they switched to talkies, which the did better than any of their peers. That’s because in their talkies, they didn’t talk, talk, talk. They stayed with the kind of thing they had been doing, and when you watch these you can pretty much fill in the conversations all by yourself, even if you aren’t a lip reader. The same gestures, the same expressions, and you know they’re saying the same things: “Step aside, Stan, I’ll handle this!” just before a disaster. Another thing they stuck with was the “tit for tat” routine. It’s in dozens of their films, and is so, so simple, and yet it works every time, with endless variations. Somebody does something nasty to somebody else. That person just stands there and takes it. There is never any attempt at defense. Then the offended party does something back, upping the ante. Before long this is escalated to the point of insanity. This is one of the best ever. A few dozen cars are lined up on a country road, unable to get around a blockage. One of the cars gently bumps Stan and Ollie’s car. Naturally, this calls for retaliation. Soon every driver and passenger is involved in the mayhem, which consists of doing damage to all the other cars, with bare hands! Yeah, those old ‘20s flivvers were shoddy, but this is ridiculous! Finally when a cop gets them all moving it is hilarious. None of these cars should be able to move, and yet they all do. One has no front wheels. One has wheels so misaligned that the heads of the passengers bob up and down all the way through the canvas top. One of them moseys by upside-down, on its roof! Don’t ask me how they did it, I don’t know. I’d seen most of the ways they famously had of wrecking cars in crazy ways and still driving away in them in their talkies, but this is the earliest I’ve seen of them driving a car that was compressed to about two feet wide. One of the best ever.