The following essay is Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s contribution to The Laurel & Hardy Blogathon, hosted today by MovieMovieBlogBlog in honor of the annual Oliver Hardy Festival held in Harlem, GA on the first weekend in October (this year it falls on October 4, hence the scheduling of the ‘thon). It must be stressed that this blogathon is not related to nor endorsed by the Festival (I would, however, urge all L&H fans to make a pilgrimage to the Harlem museum at least one time in your life), and for a full list of participants and topics discussed click here.
The time period is the Gay Nineties, and in the small Western town of Brushwood Gulch, the locus of entertainment can be found in a saloon run by Mickey Finn (James Finlayson), whose wife Lola Marcel (Sharon Lynne) is the resident chanteuse. Finn and Lola are guardians to Mary Roberts (Rosina Lawrence), whose father left her in their care when she was quite young. Mary and her caretakers are not aware of this…but their lives are about to change with the arrival of two “desert rats” in town.
A screen capture of what I believe to be the reason why I return to Way Out West over and over again...there was never a more beloved team in all of cinema. |
Stan (Laurel) and Oliver (Hardy) touch down in Brushwood
Gulch (after an awkward encounter with the wife [Vivien Oakland] of the town’s
sheriff [Stanley Fields]) to present Mary with a deed to a gold mine left to
her by her deceased father. Since
neither Stan nor Ollie have ever met Mary, the greedy Finn concocts a scheme
with Lola whereupon she will pretend to be the heir, and our heroes unwittingly
hand over the title of the mine to her.
When they finally realize their mistake, the duo valiantly attempt to
retrieve the deed but are unsuccessful.
Furthermore, they’re forced to high-tail it out of town when the
grudge-holding sheriff arrives on the scene.
Undaunted, Stan and Ollie make a second effort to right the
wrong by breaking into the saloon that night; despite the team’s noisy efforts,
Finn and his wife are slow to realize that they’re being visited by home
invaders. It’s at that time that our
heroes also encounter Mary, and an explanation of what’s transpired is passed
along to her. Laurel & Hardy finally
manage to retrieve the gold mine deed, and the two of them (joined by Mary)
make plans to head south as the film concludes.
Every feature film featuring the greatest movie comedy team
of all time is revered by L&H fans…though there is often spirited
discussion as to which movie is their best.
A consensus has gathered around their 1933 outing Sons of the Desert (the title of which inspired the team’s fan
club), which film historian William K. Everson once described as “subtler if
not funnier.” But Everson was also quick
to remind folks that Way Out West
(1937) “must rank as the best of all the Laurel & Hardy features. Not only is it pure, unadulterated Laurel
& Hardy, with no time wasted on subsidiary plotting or romantic or musical ‘relief,’
but it is also a first-rate satire of the western genre…” Way
Out West is, hands down, my favorite Laurel & Hardy film.
It’s essentially a B-picture (though because it was released
by MGM, it’s technically an A-minus picture) that pokes fun at B-pictures—in this
case, the popular movie genre of the Western; the movie takes the hoariest of
Western clichés—the gold mine falling into the hands of the villains—and simply
goes to town with it. Glenn Mitchell
once observed: “…Way Out West differs
from most comic westerns by actually parodying a genre rather than merely using
a western setting. Mel Brooks' more
recent Blazing Saddles attempts the
same but is over reliant on self-conscious dialogue references and suffers from
a tendency to stray from the target. The
success of Way Out West may owe
something to Stan Laurel's early experience in parody; similarly Oliver Hardy's
earlier work in silent westerns would have contributed.”
The person responsible for conceiving what became Way Out West? Well, that’s open to discussion. Producer Hal Roach had planned a vehicle for
his female comedy team of Patsy Kelly and Lyda Roberti entitled Girls Go West in March of 1936, but it
never came to fruition (I would have paid to see that, to be honest). Virginia Ruth Rogers, the second wife of Stan
Laurel, also laid claim to initiating the project by insisting her husband and
his partner tackle a “horse opera.” None
of this really matters in the long run: filming on Way Out West got underway on May 4, 1936 after writer Felix Adler
turned in a script he prepared with star Stan Laurel…with veteran gag writers Charley
Rogers, Arthur Vernon Jones and Jack Jevne making additional contributions as
well. James W. Horne, who had previously
guided The Boys in the features Bonnie
Scotland (1935) and The Bohemian
Girl (1936), was all set to direct.
Way Out West was
originally titled You’d Be Surprised—but
that name had to be discarded because a 1926 Raymond Griffith comedy had
already laid claim to it. Then it became
Tonight’s the Night, but 20th
Century-Fox informed the Roach Studio “not so fast, podnuh.” The name In
the Money also had to be vetoed, because a small studio called Chesterfield
had used it in 1933. It was James
Parrott, a former director at the studio whose problems with substance abuse
found him toiling as a gag writer who came up with Way Out West—though Parrott (the brother of Roach star Charley
Chase) apparently forgot that WOW was
also the title of a comedy he himself had appeared in at the studio in
1920. (In addition, it was used for a
William Haines MGM feature in 1930…and a 1935 Educational two-reeler with The
Cabin Kids.) One title considered for
the film that was discarded for unclear reasons was They Done It Wrong, a reference to Mae West’s 1933 comedy She Done Him Wrong—I kind of wish they
had gone with that one. But Way Out West is also a jokey title—originally
inspired by the D.W. Griffith-directed Way
Down East.
Way Out West may spotlight
“pure, unadulterated Laurel & Hardy”…but it’s interesting to note that a
full reel of the movie goes by before we’re introduced to The Boys; we then
find them making their way to Brushwood Gulch by mule (the mule is Dinah, with whom
they also worked in The Music Box;
Dinah also plays “Algebra” in the classic Our Gang short Honkey Donkey), and the luckless Ollie finds the only sinkhole for
miles as the two ford a steam (a wonderful gag that is repeated twice more in
the film). The duo is able to stop a
stagecoach headed for their destination (Stan gets the stage to come to a
screeching halt by “showing a little leg” in a sly It Happened One Night reference)…and once they arrive in town, they
set about their Good Samaritan work by attempting to inform Mary Roberts of her
inheritance.
Stan and Ollie’s arrival is supplemented by one of many
reasons why I love Way Out West so dearly. The Boys do a soft-shoe shuffle to the
strains of At the Ball, That’s All performed
by The Avalon Boys (an aggregation comprised of future Oscar nominee Chill
Wills, Art Green, Walter Trask and Don Brookins). The film’s original script makes no mention
of the routine (the Avalon Boys were simply supposed to do their stuff), and it’s
believed the dance was probably improvised between takes and then filmed for
cinematic immortality. The sequence is
unquestionably one of Laurel & Hardy’s best-known (you can throw a piano at
an Internet .gif of the dance and hit it) and the great thing about it is that
its charm lies in how it looks so spontaneous and unrehearsed…yet you know both
men worked so hard to perfect its utter unpretentious joy. Movie musical fans are welcome to their
elaborate MGM routines—I’ll take Stan and Ollie’s sublime hoofing any day of
the week.
In 1975, the soundtrack of this transcendent
duet was released as a single that went all the way to #2 on the U.K. pop
charts. (“Duet” is technically not the
right word here—it’s more like a quintet; in addition to Trask, Laurel and
Hardy, Chill Wills can be heard [as Stan’s bass voice] as well as Rosina
Lawrence [providing Stan’s soprano].) Way Out West is quite a tuneful little
picture, with additional musical numbers like Will You Be My Lovey-Dovey? (performed by Lynne in a Mae West-inspired
saloon sequence) and the impossible-to-get-out-of-your-head I Want to Be in Dixie (“D-I-X…I know how
to spell it!”). Way Out West may have been a lowly B-picture, but its music
(courtesy of longtime Roach Studios composer Marvin Hatley) scored an Academy
Award nomination for Best Score—a rather prestigious accomplishment. (“It certainly is!”)
But here’s the true test of Way Out West’s status as a classic comedy: it’s just so doggone
funny. So many unforgettable sequences:
Lynne trapping Stan in her “boudoir” and trying to wrest the deed away from him
(in a hilarious role reversal, Stan has put the valuable paper in his shirt and
Lynne aggressively “molests” him to retrieve it, prompting the comedian’s
infectious laughter as he’s tickled); Stan demonstrating to Ollie how he’s able
to create a flame (like a cigarette lighter) by flicking his thumb (Oliver is
both amazed and frightened when he’s able to duplicate this feat); Oliver forcing
Stan to “eat his hat.” The dialogue is
also hilarious: my favorite is when Stan unthinkingly reveals to Finn the
reason why they need to see Mary and Oliver indignantly responds as he gives his
partner a shove: “Now that he's taken you into our confidence…”
I also get delighted during the sequence when Stan and Ollie
are trying to break into the saloon and Stan gets the (not-at-all) bright idea
to hoist Ollie up to the second floor roof with a rope. Dangling in mid-air, Ollie watches helplessly
as Stan innocently lets go (“Wait until I spit on me hands…”) and in crashing
to Earth, his considerable girth makes an impression in the ground. Stan attempts to tidy up his partner by
brushing him off and at one point steps into the rut Ollie’s created to do
so. That sort of subtlety from Laurel
& Hardy just cements my affection for the duo.
“The charm of that hilarious, marvelous film is simply
unending,” wrote L&H biographer John McCabe. I think McCabe hits upon the reason why so
many fans revere Way Out West—the key
word here is “charm.” To be honest, that
also sums up the universal appeal of the duo; you can make strong cases for any
number of The Great Movie Comedians as to why their work may be superior to that
of their peers, but the beauty of Laurel & Hardy is that they were
unquestionably the most beloved
comedy team in the history of cinema. They
radiated a timelessly charismatic appeal, and I’d be hard-pressed to think of
anyone who’s been able to do that since.
Sure, they squabbled and fought like children—punching and hitting and
calling of names—but there was never any doubt that these two men were the best
of friends, holding on to one another as they faced what life was determined to
dish out. I also can’t imagine a
scenario where I would be limited to just one L&H movie for the rest of my
life…but if such a tragedy were to occur, Way
Out West would win in a walk.
2 comments:
Very, very nicely done, and an excellent tribute to my all-time favorite L&H feature film. Thanks for participating in the Blogathon!
Nice essay on what has to be one of the most lovable movies ever. (You hit the nail on the head with your description of L&H's appeal.)
Plus (as you also note), it's so freakin' funny. The first time I saw the mule/pulley gag may have been the biggest laugh I've ever gotten from a movie.
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