Laurel and Hardy Page 12

"The Bullfighters" on TPTV - not one of their best features, and certainly not as good as the Hal Roach films, ironically, which proved to be their last "big" Hollywood film and a sort of farewell, before they made the awful "Utopia", which should have been left on the cutting room floor - but that's another story.

Now on Talking Pictures TV is "A Chump At Oxford"

It's the talkie shorts for me. The long films lose the energy. And after they moved to MGM, things got worse and worse.
Some time ago, I was teaching comedy acting, which is a bit like getting Adolf Hitler to teach racial harmony. Anyway, I was talking about three classic techniques, and it was Laurel and Hardy all the way:
Timing... Where the bricks fall on Ollie's head.
The double take: James Finlayson.
The slow burn: When Ollie is in bed and thinks he's talking to Stan but it's the chimp. He slowly realises it's Stan in the other bed, does the perfect double take, and slowlier turns round to face the chimp.
Incredible that after almost a century, they're still so funny. Will people still adore Mrs Brown's Boys in 2100? Or tomorrow?

"Movie Struck" aka "Pick a Star" (1937)

And the only reason I watched this is because Laurel and Hardy make two appearances near the end of this Hal Roach film, to do a couple of routines I'd never seen before, so it was worth the wait ploughing through the 90-minute love story/musical numbers, with quite a good "Busby Berkeley" type dance routine.

The IMDb says it is a Cinderella story of a young country girl who comes to Hollywood and achieves movie stardom with the help of a publicity man, but it's nothing like Cinderella.

Lovelorn boy ( Jack Haley - the Tin Man in the 1939 Wizard of Oz) falls for beautiful singer who goes to Hollywood, nearly gets seduced by a famous film star and is saved by her small-town boyfriend - blah de blah.

It also featured some of the L&H stalwarts, like for example their nemesis James Finlayson, without his trademark large soup strainer tash.