The New Movie Magazine (Dec 1929-May 1930)

The SERIOUSNESS Stan Laurel came to America with Charlie Chaplin in "A Night in an English Music Hall." Stan was Charlie's understudy. I DON'T suppose there is anybody in the full possession of his mental faculties who will not admit that being a comedian is serious work. It always has been; it always will be. In a theater, when the audience sees the efforts of the comedians displayed before them for their delectation, they may laugh and toss about in their seats, but, oh, the sighs and tortures of soul that have preceded those thigh-poundings! Which is one reason that comedians the world over, including Hollywood, look and are so serious when they are off the stage. A hen may cackle when she reaches her creative height, and seem a veritable hoyden, but there are long lapses when she looks as .solemn as any other hen on the lot. AMONG the comedians who were having troubles of their own in their honest endeavors to make the world more suitable for human habitation were Stanley Laurel and Oliver Hardy. They had been in the humor racket, as the boys on the lot call it, for years and were suffering in their endeavors to be funny, when a terrible ogre came and sat on the head of their bed and dragged his whiskers in their faces. His name was Sound Pictures. For years Laurel and Hardy had worked in silent pictures and knew every twist and turn and shade 66 Without knowing a word of French, German or Spanish, Laurel and Hardy Manage to Make Comedies in These Unfamiliar Tongues value, until they had become veritable Professors of Comedy, and then, in the twinkling of an eye, they were demoted to the kindergarten class. It was a stumper. That night they left the lot happy and carefree and came back the next morning looking like the Prisoner of Chillon. Laboriously and patiently they began to learn how to make sounds again, and were getting along rather well, when again an earthquake threw them out of bed. Hal E. Roach himself was the subterranean disturbance. "Boys," he said one morning as they were slipping out of their cars, "from now on we are going to make talking pictures in four languages." f"The boys" were pleased. It showed that American pictures had found a new way, in spite of the manacles clapped on them by sound, to reach out over the world and spirit money away from all and sundry. "I mean you tivo are going to make sound pictures in four languages," said Ogre Roach. "Us? We? We fail to follow you," said the team of Laurel and Hardy. "Yes, you two." "How do you mean?" they asked. "We can't talk anything but English." THIS was something in the nature of a boast itself, for Hardy was born and brought up in Atlanta, Georgia, and I reckon, suh, it ain't the kind of English you-all speak. Laurel, on the other hand, was born in Ulverston, England, and every time he opens his mouth Ulverston pops out. "You've got to," said the Ogre of Culver City. "You boys are going over so well that I can sell you abroad and I can't sell you in English. You've got to learn to be funny in English, French, German and Spanish!" This was long after the Santa Barbara earthquake; in fact, it was only a few weeks ago, but the Santa Barbara earthquake is now forgotten in and around Hollywood, for the earth that morning seemed to shake worse than it had since the old globe's creation. "How can we speak it when we don't know it?" "I don't know," returned the heartless Roach. "It must be done, that's all " "How much time have we to learn those three foreign languages?" asked Monsieur Hardy. "Until Thursday," said Roach. "I know some German," said Laurel. "I can say 'Prosit.' My grandfather studied abroad and taught it to me." "I can say 'Parlez-vous,' " said Monsieur Hardy. "I learned it during the war." They found also that in Spanish they both knew