Jon S Baird (2018)
Stan & Ollie begins in 1937, in Hollywood, where Laurel and Hardy are shooting Way Out West for Hal Roach. Jon S Baird’s camera follows them from their dressing room, across a back lot and into the studio. (The mechanical hectic bustle is very much a British movie’s idea of the Dream Factory.) During the journey to the film set, Jeff Pope’s script gets over a fair amount of background information. The duo, although at the height of their fame, need or want more money. Ollie (John C Reilly) is knee-deep in alimony payments for his latest failed marriage (and is about to tie the knot for a third time). Stan (Steve Coogan) is increasingly frustrated that Ollie and he aren’t paid the kind of fee their success and standing deserve. The sequence culminates in a studio showdown between Stan and Roach (Danny Huston). Then it’s ‘Sixteen years later’, in dark, wet Newcastle, Stan and Ollie’s latest stop on a British music-hall tour. When they book into their dingy hotel, the receptionist can’t believe they’re not even playing the city’s top venue. Inside the theatre in question, the pair’s show is well received but by a sparse audience. They have clearly fallen on hard times.
Or have they? By the time they reach London, Laurel and Hardy are staying at the Savoy Hotel and their shows at the Lyceum Theatre are sold out. The problem, it seems, was nothing more than inadequate tour publicity on the part of the impresario Bernard Delfont (Rufus Jones). Once Delfont pulls his finger out by organising some publicity appearances for Stan and Ollie, they’re all the rage again. These exaggerated, phony reversals of fortune are typical of Jeff Pope’s disappointing screenplay. Stan & Ollie tells a slender story in quite a short time (97 minutes): the story would be even more slender and the film even shorter if Pope didn’t distort movie history and artificially delay the two revelations crucial to the plot (such as it is). There are hints – in the protagonists’ conversations with their wives, Ida (Nina Arianda) and Lucille (Shirley Henderson), and in the tensions between the two women – that a rift occurred between Stan and Ollie some time back. Yet the pair exchange barely a cross word in England until immediately after their triumphant opening night at the Lyceum, exchanging home truths in the middle of a big post-show reception. They’ve come to Britain hopeful of confirming funding for a new film, a Robin Hood spoof (working title ‘Rob ’em Good’), but Stan, on a visit to the London offices of the prospective producer, learns the movie isn’t going to happen. He keeps this to himself until he and Ollie are on the boat to Ireland, for what turns out to be their final stage performance.
These two revelation scenes contrast strikingly. At the Lyceum reception, Stan, the creative force of the partnership who has always written their material, tells Ollie, ‘you’d have been nothing without me’. In response, Ollie laments having had to spend his life ‘with a hollow man hiding behind his typewriter’. Stan insists that, ‘I loved us’. ‘You loved Laurel and Hardy’, says Ollie, ‘but you never loved me’. So far, so showbiz melodrama cliché; then Stan says, more interestingly, ‘So what?’ – approaching an admission that what Ollie claims is true. They make up as soon as the latter has a heart attack (just as they’re about to present first prize in a bathing beauty contest in Worthing). As his partner receives medical treatment, Stan tells his wife, ‘I love him, Ida’. When he eventually admits that the Robin Hood film is off, Ollie reassures Stan that he already knew. Stan is puzzled: why did Ollie keep pretending otherwise? What, says Ollie, can the likes of us do except pretend? The two men, in other words, do effortless U-turns. Stan isn’t an emotionally empty human being after all. Ollie recognises that performance is their lifeblood. The knotty problem that briefly emerged in Stan’s ‘So what?’ is easily dissolved, in a warm, sentimental finale.
It’s not unusual for comedians, when supposedly their real selves in chat show interviews etc, to persist with their act (particularly impressionists, often nervous of using their own voice). Stan & Ollie plays on this comic trait repeatedly and variously. It works well enough in, for example, their antics at the Newcastle hotel’s reception desk. When a luggage trunk accidentally slides down a flight of steps at a railway station, however, echoing the piano in The Music Box, Jon S Baird is merely using Laurel and Hardy highlights to gussy up an undernourished narrative. All that binds these comic-routines-in-real-life moments together is the skill of the two leads – who also save the film as a whole. The above objections to the screenplay won’t worry many viewers of Stan & Ollie (and there are many: on its opening weekend, it nudged ahead of The Favourite and Mary Poppins Returns in British box-office returns). What counts for most people who buy a ticket is Steve Coogan’s and John C Reilly’s impersonations and re-enactment of Laurel and Hardy routines. Even for viewers (like me) who find Stan & Ollie tepid and evasive, the main actors make it well worth seeing.
There were signs in Philomena (which he co-wrote with Jeff Pope) that even Steve Coogan, in the presence of greatness, knew his place. Playing opposite Judi Dench, he gave a performance free of the self-approval that has marred most of his others. The same thing happens here, even if there are more factors involved than the status of Stan Laurel in the comic pantheon – the technical challenge of impersonating him, the quality of John C Reilly’s playing of Oliver Hardy. Under a ton of make-up, Reilly has remarkable physical freedom and emotional expressiveness. There are moments when both actors’ portraits go beyond accomplished mimicry but this is a case where accomplished mimicry in itself makes for substantial achievement. This is evident chiefly in the sketches from Stan and Ollie’s stage show, including the hard-boiled-eggs-and-nuts scene from County Hospital. It isn’t so much a matter of introducing new generations of filmgoers to Laurel and Hardy (examples of whose work is all over YouTube). Rather, it’s that Coogan, Reilly and Jon S Baird (whose previous cinema feature was Filth) recreate these routines so scrupulously that they let us see how ingenious the originals were – and make us laugh.
‘Two double acts for the price of one’, laughs Bernard Delfont nervously to other guests as Ida and Lucille cross verbal swords at the Lyceum reception. It’s true: Nina Arianda and Shirley Henderson, physically and temperamentally as chalk-and-cheese as the men whose wives they’re playing, do plenty with their narrowly written roles. They’re often funny, occasionally touching. Lucille’s lack of protest when her husband defies doctor’s orders to resume the tour with Stan is one of many instances of the film’s ignoring things that complicate the story yet Henderson, quietly but eloquently, conveys Lucille’s concern for Ollie’s health, during the sea crossing to Ireland and the show there. Ida is a dual caricature – a domineering, humourless Rar-shan and a Hollywood nobody who absurdly overstates her past glories[1] – but Arianda’s vivid precision is very enjoyable.
The film’s characterisation of Bernard Delfont is demeaning (hardly the fault of Rufus Jones). His public image was less distinctive than that of his larger, older, cigar-smoking brother Lew Grade. Delfont was smoother and more impersonal but it’s a travesty to reduce him, as Stan & Ollie does, to the essence of shallow, misguided show business opportunism. Preoccupied with his quickly rising star Norman Wisdom, Delfont prematurely decides that Laurel and Hardy are has-beens. When Ollie falls ill, he’s replaced in the stage show with (the fictional?) Nobby Cook (John Henshaw): Stan walks out just as the curtain is about to go up on his first appearance with Cook. If Bernard Delfont had been as clueless as he seems here, he wouldn’t have enjoyed a long and lucrative career in theatre and cinema management. As he acknowledges in an interview with Nick Smurthwaite on the theatrical website Banner World, Jeff Pope doesn’t even believe that Delfont was the character he’s turned him into[2].
The film generally isn’t too concerned with factual accuracy. We’re given the impression, for example, that the crucial rupture between Stan and Ollie occurred when the latter made ‘the elephant picture’ for Hal Roach. This was the box-office flop Zenobia (1939), released a year before Laurel and Hardy’s last Roach-produced films. In 1941 the duo signed up with United Artists and the next year moved to MGM, albeit on disadvantageous financial terms, and made commercially successful movies until they decided to take a break from Hollywood and tour in Europe. Their last live theatre performance was in Plymouth (in May 1954). A biopic isn’t a history lesson and dramatic licence is fine if it’s put to good use – as it is when Baird and Pope relocate the stage farewell in Ireland. This episode refers to a show the pair gave in Cobh, Ireland in September 1953, recounted by Stan Laurel (according to Wikipedia) as follows:
‘The love and affection we found that day at Cobh was simply unbelievable. There were hundreds of boats blowing whistles and mobs and mobs of people screaming on the docks. We just couldn’t understand what it was all about. And then something happened that I can never forget. All the church bells in Cobh started to ring out our theme song “Dance of the Cuckoos” and Babe [Hardy] looked at me and we cried. I’ll never forget that day. Never.’
Those church bells playing the ‘Cuckoo’ theme are a high point of Stan & Ollie: it makes emotional sense for the Cobh show to be Laurel and Hardy’s last.
The Zenobia falling out is another matter. The film-makers, once they’ve exaggerated its actual importance as a turning point in Laurel and Hardy’s careers and relationship, have no further use for it as a plotting convenience: Stan and Ollie, inseparable in our minds as a screen partnership, must therefore be indestructibly good pals in real life too. (Other, relatively minor themes are introduced only to be promptly dropped. While Stan is on his abortive ‘Rob ‘em Good’ mission, Ollie is illustrating his gambling addiction with a bet on a horse at Kempton. On a London street, he buys a copy of The Sporting Times, which ceased publication in 1932, to learn the inevitable result. That’s the last of his gambling.) Jon S Baird and Jeff Pope, who has said that Laurel and Hardy are his ‘heroes’, are in tune with audience expectations. They’re aware that many of us want to feel that stars we find likeable, even lovable, on stage and screen, and whose work gives us pleasure, even delight, are nice people into the bargain. It’s this awareness, announced by Rolfe Kent’s nearly incessant heartwarming score, that drives Stan & Ollie.
16 January 2019
[1] She harps on about working with Preston Sturges. According to IMDB, the Russian-born Ida Kitaeva did have an uncredited role as a dancer in Hail the Conquering Hero, a couple of years before she married Stan Laurel.
[2] ‘Pope believes [that the poor advance booking figures were] due to the kind of venues they were playing. “At the time, Delfont was in dispute with Moss Empires, who owned all the big touring venues, so they were playing smaller theatres and the public simply didn’t believe it was the real Laurel and Hardy. I don’t think they felt any animosity towards Delfont. They were grateful he was offering them work when no one else was. … Delfont did drive them hard but he also gave them a generous guarantee. As well as being a great showman, he was also a shrewd businessman. …” ‘
