Date and Time for this Past Event
- Friday, Nov 3, 2023 7pm - 9pm
Details
Special Features: Live musical accompaniment by Andrew Simpson
AFI’s Silent Cinema Showcase returns with another selection of newly restored screen classics and rare gems from the silent era.
THE LUCKY DOG
The first film to feature the talents of both Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (in separate scenes) was made six years before they became an official comedy team. Laurel plays a penniless dog lover and Hardy plays a crook who tries to rob him and his new paramour. DIR/SCR Jess Robbins; PROD Gilbert M. "Broncho Billy" Anderson. U.S., 1921, b&w, 17 min. NOT RATED
45 MINUTES FROM HOLLYWOOD
In the first Hal Roach two-reel short featuring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (albeit in separate scenes), a young man visiting Hollywood on family business gets into trouble when he sees a bank robbery in progress and thinks it is a movie scene. DIR Fred Guiol; SCR H. M. Walker; SCR/PROD Hal Roach. U.S., 1926, b&w, 22 min. NOT RATED
New 2K DCP restoration
DUCK SOUP (1927)
Although it was released before the on-screen partnership was officially acknowledged, and without the couple's familiar fraying-bourgeois air, the ultimate Stan-and-Ollie relationship is already firmly defined in DUCK SOUP. Stan Laurel is dithery and timid, but ultimately the more resourceful; Oliver Hardy is dominating-going on-bullying, confident and generally badly mistaken. They learn with alarm that the Forest Rangers are rounding up vagrants to fight forest fires, and swiftly take refuge in a mansion whose owners are leaving on holiday. In their absence, Hardy endeavors to rent out the house, while Laurel helpfully disguises himself as Agnes the housemaid. Things do not end well. Although they dominate the film, the nominal star was Madeline Hurlock (1897–1989), who was recruited as a Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty and went on to team up with comics like Harry Langdon and Billy Bevan. Here, as Lady Tarbotham, she maintains her poise against all odds. Though he enjoyed the incomparable directorial guidance of Fred Guiol and Leo McCarey, Laurel may well already have been exerting his influence on the concept of their films, since the story is adapted from a sketch by his father, Arthur J. Jefferson. The film was re-made with sound as ANOTHER FINE MESS in 1930. Leo McCarey re-used the title for his 1933 Marx Brothers film. (Note courtesy of David Robinson, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.) DIR Fred Guiol, Leo McCarey; SCR Arthur J. Jefferson, from his sketch "Home from the Honeymoon"; PROD Hal Roach. U.S., 1927, b&w, 20 min. NOT RATED
SLIPPING WIVES
A young woman (Priscilla Dean) decides to make her indifferent husband jealous by flirting with a handyman (Stan Laurel) at a party, but her butler (Oliver Hardy) is having none of it. DIR Fred Guiol; SCR H. M. Walker; SCR/PROD Hal Roach. U.S., 1927, b&w, 23 min. NOT RATED
