Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy - Hardcover

Louvish, Simon

 
9780312266516: Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0312266510 ISBN 13: 9780312266516
Verlag: Thomas Dunne Books, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy have remained, from 1927 to the present day, the screen's most famous and popular comedy double act, celebrated by legions of fans. But despite many books about their films and individual lives, there has never been a fully researched, definitive narrative biography of the duo, from birth to death.

Louvish traces the early lives of Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy and the surrounding minstrel and variety theatre, which influenced all of their later work. Louvish examines the rarely seen solo films of both our heroes, prior to their serendipitous pairing in 1927, in the long-lost short "Duck Soup." The inspired casting teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives a nearly impossible feat.

Between 1927 and 1938, they were able to successfully bridge the gap between silent and sound films, which tripped up most of their prominent colleagues. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941, to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous, with the nine films made there ranking as some of the most embarrassing moments of cinematic history.

In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and their influence is seen to this day. The clowns were elusive behind their masks, but now Simon Louvish can finally reveal their full and complex humanity, and their passionate devotion to their art. In Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy, Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Simon Louvish is the acclaimed author of the biographies of the Marx Brothers, Monkey Business and W. C. Fields, The Man on the Flying Trapeze. He is also the author of nine novels. He teaches at the London International Film School.

Rezensionen

Generally considered the finest film comedy duo, Laurel and Hardy made their mark in both the silent and the sound eras. While drawing on the efforts of past biographers, Louvish (London International Film Sch.; Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of the Marx Brothers) delves deeper into the personal and professional lives of this beloved team. He explores the impact of the British music hall tradition on Stanley Jefferson (Laurel), whose father wrote plays and skits and ran theaters, and the early cinema's influence on Oliver Norvell Hardy, who at 18 was taking tickets and projecting films in Milledgeville, GA's Electric Theater. Though both came to work at Hal Roach Studios, it wasn't until 1927 that Laurel and Hardy engaged in their first team effort: Duck Soup (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers' vehicle). After such high points as Sons of the Desert (1934), an artistic decline began owing to the team's age, bad scripts, exiting Hal Roach, and new satirical comedy styles from Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges. Louvish has digested films, reviews, and interviews with those who knew the pair to reach entirely reasonable conclusions and create fully realized human beings. This definitive treatment is recommended for public and academic libraries, as well as special film collections.
Kim Holston, American Inst. for Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters, Malvern, PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Louvish has written a biography of Laurel and Hardy that brims with affection and still preserves an honest, unbiased view of their creativity and personal traumas. He presents a fully rounded, well-paced portrait of their contrasting backgrounds (Laurel was born in England; Hardy in Georgia), early separate careers and eventual union in a Hal Roach production, 45 Minutes from Hollywood, in 1926. Roach claimed to have discovered them before reluctantly conceding partial credit to Leo McCarey, who directed many of the duo's best movies. After appearances in five undistinguished pictures, their careers soared with such classics as Duck Soup (not to be confused with the Marx Brothers version) and The Second Hundred Years. The two saw themselves as working actors who happened to hit on an incredible streak of good luck. However, their off-camera lives were anything but lucky, and Louvish, in his chapter "Multiple Whoopee or Wives and Woes," poignantly chronicles each man's domestic catastrophes, with particularly painful emphasis on Hardy's marriage to his alcoholic second wife, Myrtle Lee. Laurel, after four disastrous unions, finally found happiness with Russian opera singer Ida Kitaeva Raphael. Thanks to Louvish's erudite yet accessible style, in-depth studies of Laurel and Hardy films are even more absorbing to read than their marital conflicts. A touching example of Louvish's deep feeling for his subjects occurs when he describes Hardy's huge 150-pound weight loss, in which he concludes, "it probably never occurred to Oliver Hardy that his fans actually considered him beautiful." It's clear the author does, and this tender admiration invites the reader to share his view.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When this dual biography of the great film comedy team debuted in Britain in 2001, The Times of London reviewer said it was "as good as writing about Hollywood comedy gets." Fortunately, it is better as biography, tracing the careers of both men so scrupulously that nearly 200 pages have gone by before the narrative reaches their first collaboration. Both comedians, well into their thirties by then, had already had substantial careers, mostly playing second bananas, but Louvish's phrase-mongering inflates the page count beyond what it would have been with an economical recounting of the comics' prepartnership doings. He is as attentive to the facts of their lives thereafter, and also to the plots and the production of many of their films. He adds very little to the appreciation of Laurel and Hardy's art, however; he mostly just traces routines in the films back to their predecessors in previous films or Laurel's and his father's stage acts. This may be "as good as writing about Hollywood comedy gets," but that is meager praise. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy
PART ONE
Twice Upon a Time ...
CHAPTER ONE
Once Upon a Clown
The clown was always disreputable, once his ties with religion were severed. Although the old song tells us 'the things that we're liable to hear in the Bible, they ain't necessarily so', merry-making, as far back as we care to go, was associated with drunkenness and wine. The biblical archetype, Jubal-Cain, was said to have been 'the father of all such as handle the harp and organ', which places him perhaps dubiously as the ancestor of Harpo and Chico Marx. Nevertheless, by the time we got to Bacchus, the ties to divinity were getting a little shaky. The Greeks were supposed to have initiated, or defined, the art of the Pantomime, the development in dance of a language of gestures, in which emotions and ideas can be presented. The old Hellenes were said to have given us Tragedy and Comedy, although Chico Marx once quipped that 'You can't take anything from the Greeks; you can't even get your change back.' Tragedy was for the upper classes, the kings and queens and gods and princes. Comedy was for the common people.
The Romans stole all the Greeks' ideas, though their sense of humour was somewhat coarser. A good day out at the Colosseum might start with the jugglers and magicians but end with blood and guts on the sand. One of Stan Laurel's early stage acts, formed in a break from his stint with Fred Karno's road show, was entitled Rum 'Uns from Rome, but there were none so rum as the Romans themselves. The author of the Satyricon, Petronius, was said to be 'a man who spends his days sleeping and his nights working or enjoying himself. Industry is the usual foundation of success, but with him it was idleness.' One of the little ditties enclosed in his famous work goes like this:
The Censor frowns and knits his brows, The Censor wants to stop us, The Censor hates my guileless prose, My simple modern opus.My cheerful unaffected style Is Everyman when in his humour, My candid pen narrates his joys, Refusing to philosophize.
An easy recognition. Out of the Roman Mimi, defined as 'an impudent race of buffoons who excelled in mimicry, and like our domestic fools, admitted into convivial parties to entertain the guests', emerged the gaudily costumed character of Harlequin - a clown of shaven head, sooty face, flat, unshod feet, and patched coat of many colours. Out of the same mould emerges the Italian Pulcinello, or the English Punch, with his long, hooked nose, his staring, goggle eyes and humped back. The generic name for this whole family of clowns has echoed down the centuries - in Latin sannio, in Italian zanni, in English zany. With the fall of Rome, and the rise of sombre-minded Christianity, these mimes were excluded from the rites of the Church, and their entertainments were frowned on. According to the Theodosian Creed, it was forbidden to administer the sacraments to actors except when death was imminent, and then only so that, if they recovered, they could renounce their calling. Rogues and Vagabonds, they wandered the earth, stubbornly laughing at tragedy. They were a worldwide phenomenon, in the Islamic and Oriental realms as well as the Christian. No culture was complete without its clowns. The elite among them became the court jesters, the fools with cap and bells who could laugh at the king when anyone else doing so would be doomed. But the truth, told behind the mask of the jester, could be only a joke: the proper 'truth' was still reserved by Church and State.
The old zannis continued to mutate, begetting a new family in the Italian theatre of the fifteenth century and on: Pantaloon, a merchant; Dottore, a comic physician; Spavento, a braggart; Pulcinello, the joker; and the blundering servant, Arlecchino. A description of Arlecchino - Harlequin, in R. J. Broadbent's 1901 A History of Pantomime, echoes, once again, with a close familiarity:
 
He is a mixture of wit, simplicity, ignorance, and grace, he is a half-made-up man, a great child with gleams of reason and intelligence, and all his mistakes and blunders have something arch about them. The true mode of representing him is to give him suppleness, agility, the playfulness of a kitten with a certain coarseness of exterior, which renders his actions moreabsurd. His part is that of a faithful valet; greedy; always in love; always in trouble, either on his own or his master's account; afflicted and consoled as easily as a child, and whose grief is as amusing as his joy.
 
Sometimes Harlequin was just a simple booby or dolt, or a kind of Sancho Panza, travelling with a companion who was sharp-witted and smart, who played the part of his foil. These clowns developed in various ways, with different masks and costumes. One French observer of the eighteenth-century English clown type wrote:
 
[He] is an odd and fantastical being ... His strange dress seems to have been taken from the American Indians. It consists of a white, red, yellow and green net work, ornamented with diamond-shaped pieces of stuff of various colours. His face is floured, and streaked with paint a deep carmine; the forehead is prolonged to the top of the head, which is covered with a red wig, from the centre of which a little stiff tail points to the sky. His manners are no less singular than his costume. He is not dumb, like our Pierrot, but, on the contrary, he sustains an animated and witty conversation; he is also an acrobat, and very expert in feats of strength.
 
The early nineteenth century saw a great inheritor of this old tradition: Joseph 'Joey' Grimaldi. Until his death in 1837 Grimaldi dominated the comedy scene in London. Before the days of the cinema, before the days of photography, it is difficult to gauge the particular qualities that made him so unforgettable to the audiences of his day. Whether in the simple way in which he stole a pie from a pieman, or in his many masks as a chimney sweep, a dandy, a tragic actor, a wet-nurse, he was a master of mimicry, who, in the words of a contemporary, 'uses his folly as a stalking horse, under cover of which he shoots his wit'. He also sang comic songs, 'infused with biting satire ... poking fun at the vices of the age, getting laughs out of transforming everyday objects and gilding every situation with his inimitable and immortal comic gift'. Grimaldi was noted as well for his comic duelling, and the astute student of comedy might flash forward to Stan Laurel's solo two-reel short of 1923, Frozen Hearts, in which our hero, as a Russian swain, Ivan Kektumoff, duels with his rival, the equally well-named Lieutenant Tumankikine, for seven non-stop months until both are buried deep in snow. Clowns, if not their audiences, always know their history.
Grimaldi became a prototype for the clowns of the Circus, the Big Show sired by the eighteenth century's penchant for extravagance and spectacle. But as a stage performer, in the London theatres of Covent Garden and Sadler's Wells, he also set the mode for a generation of music-hall performers who were to follow, adopting his mélange of comic songs, patter, physical agility and multiple personalities expressed through a gallery of roles. The Harlequin coat of many colours dropped away, and a kind of genteel frock coat, with frayed pants and an often battered hat, reminiscent of the man about town who is somewhat the worse for wear, became a more common signature.
The story of music-hall is the story of the many individuals who were its featured entertainers. In the 'legit' theatre, the play's the thing, but in variety, it's the performer. Grimaldi established the idea of a 'style': it doesn't matter what you do, but how you do it, the manner it is that makes the clown.
Above all, music-hall was a popular medium; in the words of one of its chroniclers, Mr W. MacQueen Pope,
 
an entertainment of the People, for the People, by the People. It made no claim to Art, it made no claim to Culture, yet it was in its individual way a very highly skilled form of stage art ... Music-hall was always very much larger than life. It ignored half-tones, it went out for highlights all the time. And it was right in doing so, because it dealt with a public which was itself surging with vitality. For music-hall was born on the wave of prosperity which came into being on the accession of the young Queen Victoria, it belonged to an era of prosperity and the people who welcomed it and supported it were the sons and daughters of an age of Beef, Beer and Peace.
 
Music-hall was a medium for the 'working classes' - or those of them who could afford the price of admission, as far from everybody shared in the benefits of the Victorian industrial boom that made Britain Europe's foremost empire. While this theatre thrived, Karl Marx (long before Groucho) formed his theories of the contradictions of Capital while nursing his carbuncles in Soho. But the audiences of music-hall seemed happy with their contradictions - at least while the show was on. Like their predecessors in the eighteenth century, who cheered at John Gay's The Beggar's Opera - the play that, by its boldness, galvanized the government of the day into instituting formal stage censorship - but also applauded war with France, so the people of Beef, Beer and Peace cheered ontheir Imperial Army when it went to war for Queen, Country and Commerce. Like the general public of the next century's mass-entertainment medium - America's moving picture industry - they could be supremely jealous of their own freedom from government, and less particular about the rights of foreigners, at one and the same time. This, too, would mark the nature of mass entertainment on stage and screen, and to our day.
The clowns knew all their moods and fears, their joys and their anxieties. In the last two...

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Verlag
Thomas Dunne Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0312266510
ISBN 13 
9780312266516
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
512
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