The Fox and the Huns
Nineteen forty was a strange year in America. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nearing the end of his second term as President. The Depression was still a reality for millions of citizens, though there was hope for a better economic future. The radio and the cinema newsreels brought sombre news of the war in Europe: in the spring the Nazi forces occupied Denmark and invaded Norway, Belgium and the Netherlands. There was a new Prime Minister in Great Britain, Winston Churchill, soon to lead a wartime coalition. In June Italy joined the war on the German side, and the Germans occupied Paris. In the autumn Japanese armies occupied Indochina, and Japan, Germany and Italy made a three-power ‘Axis’ pact in Berlin. In November Roosevelt was elected for an unprecedented third term.
But still, America was not at war. Isolationists and interventionists fought on the battleground of public opinion, but it was not until March 1941 that Congress passed the Lend—Lease Act, which enabled Roosevelt to help Britain’s war effort. Hollywood, in particular, was all atwitch about the dangers of US involvement. The Jewish moguls of the big studios, Mayer, Cohn, et al., bent over backwards for fear of an anti-Semitic backlash in a country still rife with racial prejudice. In any case, the studios, MGM in particular, were still doing business with Germany. The exception was Warner Brothers, who had, in 1939, produced Anatole Litvak’s somewhat lurid tirade, Confessions of a Nazi Spy. The Production Code still held, even in 1940, that the movie industry was bound by impartiality not to urge America to go to war.
On the other hand, Hollywood was being renewed, as it had always been, by a new influx of foreign refugees who joined the movie colony. Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Curt Siodmak were among many who fled Nazism during the 1930s and were to make their mark on the movies. Most significant of all, perhaps, a young Viennese, Samuel (later Billy) Wilder, arrived in 1934 and established
a name as a screenwriter, not least of a movie directed by an older German immigrant, Ernst Lubitsch: Ninotchka, with Greta Garbo, made in 1939. Wilder was to carve out his own niche as Hollywood’s most sophisticated satirist.
The jokes were changing, even if the urge to laugh in the face of dire reality was as powerful as ever. Another satirist, Frank Capra, having left the silent world of Harry Langdon, had prospered in the talkie era. Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) wrote the rules for a new genre of romantic comedy. His second Oscar winner, Mr Deeds Goes to Town (1936), perfectly expressed the Depression-driven dream of the common man beating the established bureaucracy. The pure clowns, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Laurel and Hardy, faced competition, not only from screwball comedies, but from the bleak comedy of contemporary life.
Born in the 1880s and 1890s, the great vaudevillian clowns were all now in their late forties or early fifties. W. C. Fields, the elder anti-statesman of comedy, was sixty years old in 1940, the year of The Bank Dick. By now, there were other contenders for the clown’s thrones, upstarts of one kind or another. The Ritz Brothers, Al, Harry and Jim, had been making comedies since 1934. Audiences, if not the critics, liked them. Two major stars of radio, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, released their first joint movie, The Road to Singapore, in 1940. And another comedy team, coming out of late vaudeville and Broadway revue, Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, had made an unnoticed film called One Night in the Tropics in 1940, and were about to shoot a film that would kick-start their own successful career, Buck Privates, released in 1941.
Other contemporaries of Stan’s and Babe’s had long dropped out of the running. Buster Keaton was making a series of forgettable shorts and was about to join Harry Langdon on the begging circuit ekeing out a living as a hired gagman. Harold Lloyd had virtually retired after 1938’s Professor Beware, only to return for a swan-song in Preston Sturges’s ill-fated The Sin of Harold Diddlebock (aka Mad Wednesday) in 1947. Chaplin was following his own star into the brave provocation of The Great Dictator, which premiered in October 1940, and he would not make another film until Monsieur Verdoux, in 1946.
But Stan and Babe did not feel defeated. The final divorce from Hal Roach appeared to both as the harbinger of a completely new
start. For the first time, they had their own production company. They could now work for themselves, and make their own deals with other studios. Their enthusiasm was not dampened by the lack of a rush of employers following their declaration of independence. Babe’s new marriage, and Stan’s preoccupation with constructing Fort Laurel, made them amenable to the inevitable lull. In the interim, they performed a sketch, ‘How to Get a Driver’s License’, at a Red Cross Benefit in San Francisco on 22 August 1940. The audience’s response was so satisfying that Ben Shipman arranged for a nationwide tour of the act, which took them from the West to the East Coast, from September to December that year. In Omaha, they were given the key to the city, but the city managers had to reclaim it in embarrassment because they had promised it to their next visitor of that day, Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie. The boys, in any case, rooted for Roosevelt.
The direct contact with the fans revealed to Stan and Babe just how popular they remained with the public. Stan was cheered up enough to have another go at his on-again off-again marriage with Ruth, which was announced by the press in January 1941:
‘Fort Laurel has fallen,’ beamed Film Comedian Stan Laurel last night as he brought a bride to his high-walled ‘retreat from blondes’ at 20213 Strathern Road, Reseda.
For drama and impact his announcement hardly vied with the tidings of Paul Revere or the message to Garcia. The collapse of the Laurel Maginot Line was fairly apparent to all concerned Saturday when Stan remarried the third of his four wives, Virginia Ruth Laurel, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
However, Mrs. L. Nos. 3 and 5, a shapely blonde with aquamarine eyes, made it official by giving the fort’s main caserne a quick once-over and decided to redecorate the whole she-bang.
WE’LL GET ALONG SWELL
‘It happened suddenly,’ Stan explained his newest romance, ‘like heart failure, or strike one. We hadn’t seen each other for a year when Virginia called me up a few nights ago. I invited her out to the fort, and first thing we knew we had decided to do it all over again.’
The Reverend Albert C. Melton, of Las Vegas’s Immanuel Community Church, performed the ceremony in the aptly named ‘Hitching Post’. The hitching took place just in time, for Stan was
sued only one month later by his ex-bodyguard, ‘Tonnage’ Martin, a six-foot-two, 395-pound geezer who had the dangerous task of interposing himself between Stan and Illiana, and was now claiming back salary of $2,700.
Longer-lasting help was, however, now on hand, as gossip queen Louella Parsons announced on 24 April 1941, during a visit by Stan and Babe to Mexico City:
Laurel and Hardy, who have been away from the screen too long, are booked to do ‘Forward March’, an Army comedy for Twentieth Century Fox. Senor Fat and Senor Thin, as they are called by their Mexican fans, were so popular in Mexico City that it opened all of our eyes to what these two comics mean to movie-goers all over the world.
Stan and Babe were in Mexico to attend a film festival, but also on an appropriately quixotic quest to make a deal for a Laurel and Hardy version of Don Quixote. This might well have been what Charley Chase called a ‘darb’, but the intriguing promise never was fulfilled. Instead, they had to make do with a hearty handclasp from the Mexican Foreign Minister, who said, ‘The wit of such artists as Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown and Mischa Auer has brought smiles to faces frowning under the weight of care and worry of life itself.’ Darryl F. Zanuck appeared to agree, as he brought out his gold signing pen and put his moniker on the dotted line. The publicity directors of Fox explained the matter thus:
In the spring of 1941, Twentieth Century Fox was looking for comedians so that the studio might participate in the vogue for slapstick comedy, a result, probably, of war psychology. Laurel and Hardy were caught on a personal appearance tour, without film contractual obligations, and, in June, were signed to make two pictures a year for the next two years.
A familiar biography of Stan and Ollie, appended to this press release, ended curiously with a final tally of ‘Measurements: Laurel — Height: 5 feet 9 inches; Weight: 160 pounds; Hair: Blond; Eyes: Blue. Hardy — Height: 6 feet I inch; Weight: 293 pounds; Hair: Brown; Eyes: Brown.’ This was presumably to demonstrate that Fox had got something substantial for its money.
Twentieth Century Fox had long been a somewhat maverick company. The original Fox company, founded by film pioneer William Fox in 1913, was making about seventy films a year by 1917, covering the whole gamut of forms and genres — westerns
with Tom Mix and Buck Jones, children’s tales, steamy romances with Theda Bara. In the 1920s, directors such as Raoul Walsh, William Wellman and John Ford added lustre to the company, and in 1927 it enabled German director F. W. Murnau to make his Expressionist masterpiece, Sunrise. The talkies brought musicals with Shirley Temple and Alice Faye. In 1931 the studio reorganized itself, splitting into an ‘A’ and a ‘B’ unit, with the former handling a smaller number of prestige products, and the latter grinding out cheaper genre product, like the popular ‘Charlie Chan’ detective series, starring the most un-Chinese Warner Oland of Sweden, and its spin-off, the shorter-lived Japanese ‘Mr Moto’, played of course by a Hungarian émigré, Peter Lorre. The ‘B’ unit also employed the Ritz Brothers. In 1935, with founder Fox already out of the picture, a merger with Twentieth Century Pictures created the studio Laurel and Hardy now joined.
In 1941, the ‘B’ unit was headed by Sol Wurtzel, a dry veteran who had been with the company almost from its inception. He knew exactly what he wanted — cheap and fast pictures that would play as second features. Spare the trimmings; churn the sausages out of the machine; shoot first and don’t ask any questions. The choice of a first comedy for the newly signed team was dictated by the principle of box-office precedent: Abbott and Costello had just made a big hit for Universal with Buck Privates. Fox’s response: shoot a ‘Buck Privates’ for Laurel and Hardy.
The post-Roach features of Laurel and Hardy have always been a sore point for their many fans, involving much argument over the beer mugs and chicken fries. John McCabe, in his classic Mr Laurel and Mr Hardy, first published in 1961, dismisses the entire œuvre from 1941 to 1945 with barely a page, saying, through obviously gritted teeth, ‘To evaluate the results as charitably as possible, these films should not have been made.’
Other aficionados have been even more charitable, none more so than Desert Son Scott MacGillivray, whose book, Laurel and Hardy from the Forties Forward, gives chapter and verse, from soup to nuts, of the despised Fox and post-Fox product. This tells us a great deal about a neglected period, but does not make Stan and Babe’s 1940s movies any more delightful to sit through.
In one sense, the Fox contract and its consequences can be said to prove, in painful hindsight, Stan Laurel’s lack of a solid business sense. McGillivray claims that Stan was not aware, when Ben Shipman made the deal, that he and Babe would end up in Fox’s ‘B’ unit. If ‘twere so, ’twere a grievous fault, and grievously did Stan suffer for it. Given the apparent vogue for ‘slapstick’ declared by Fox, the boys might have been snapped up by another studio — Universal, which had the new franchise of Abbott and Costello, or Paramount, which had the first Hope—Crosby ‘Road’ movie. But this evades the issue — that Stan and Babe were the stars of yesteryear, in a business that, then as now, fetishized the upcoming and the new.
Fox hired Laurel and Hardy precisely because they could get a tried brand on the cheap. After the first movie, the fee for each film, paid to Laurel and Hardy Feature Productions, was stabilized at $50,000 a picture, not, even in those days, a massive amount if it had to be split three ways with Ben Shipman and cover the company running costs.
Stan’s major miscalculation, however, lay in a more technical area. The very size of the Fox operation, and its rigid bureaucratic structure, made it a very different working environment from the Roach lot. Lois Laurel told author McGillivray how she was taken aback, as a young teenager, at the procedures she had to go through to visit her father on the Fox set:
They’d give me a temporary badge, which you’d turn in when you left, and I was escorted to the sound stage. I was told I wouldn’t be wandering around … where at Roach I’d be in the barbershop and down to see ‘Our Gang’, I could go where I wanted or fall in the lake.
At home, both Stan and Babe complained that the scripts written for them often made little sense. The Fox ‘B’ system was to assign writers, give the actors their texts, and tell them to get on with it, as quickly as possible. Lucille recalled how Babe would sit shaking his head in the evenings when he went over his lines, reading something out to her, and saying, ‘You know I [my character] wouldn’t say that …’ But, as Stan claims to have found out too late, they were hired as actors, with no formal approval of story or direction. All real control had slipped away.
The problems are evident from the first ten minutes of the first
Laurel and Hardy Fox film, Great Guns. Stan and Babe are house servants of a young millionaire, Dan Forrester (played by Dick Nelson), who has been convinced by his relatives and doctor that he is a helpless victim of a mass of allergies, and is too weak to function in the real world. He receives a Draft Board summons, and passes his medical tests, so his faithful minions, Stan and Ollie, enlist with him, to protect him from any harm.
Stan and Ollie as loyal gardener and chauffeur? Surely not! But these characters are perfectly happy to be servile, revelling in their inferior status. Wherever they go, they act stupidly, and are met with jeers and insults. But does the worm turn? Not a millimetre. Once a worm, always a worm, seems the motto of the script of Great Guns.
The idea men at Fox, and their handmaiden, writer Lou Breslow, had come up with a firm proposition to change the boys’ previous characters. No longer would they be grotesque children in adult form, imps of the perverse, the forces of chaos. Now they were to be ‘realistic’ characters, albeit exaggerations, but of recognizable types. This was to be followed both in word and substance: even the white, clown-like make-up that exemplified Stan and Ollie as the public knew them was to be changed for the more realistic look. The adult children were now to show their age.
The results, which should have been foreseen by the writers, and director Monty Banks, of silent-movie fame — whose last movie enterprise this was — were quite dire: The only way for Stan and Ollie to be realistic and yet still remain the same dumb innocents was to make them appear simply stupid, practically retarded persons. Gone is the Stan that once said to Ollie, ‘You know how dumb I used to be? Well, I’m better now.’ These idiots are too dumb to know that they’re dumb, or ever were. When lectured by the bullying sergeant, Ollie in uniform says, ‘Maybe they’ll put me in the Intelligence Corpse.’ The sarge, pointing to Stan: ‘Brother, you’re with him now.’
On it goes, the parade of imbecility, wooden supporting actors and hackneyed scenes. To pep things up, the writers supplied Stan with a pet crow, Penelope, who follows them wherever they go and is the mechanism that eventually saves the day when the boys are taken captive during army manœuvres. The entire army background is, in fact, embarrassingly anachronistic, with the troops
practising their cavalry prowess and breaking bucking broncos, displays of riding going along with stock shots of tanks, a somewhat lacklustre preparation for the defence of the nation. Very soon, indeed, America would be at war, and the horses would have to be left in the stables.
Reborn in the Fox-hole — Great Guns
The lack of the old stock company is felt very keenly. Gone is Jimmy Finlayson; gone are the harpy wives, Mae Busch et al.; gone is the apoplectic Billy Gilbert, replaced by one Ludwig Stossel as the young millionaire’s quack Dr Schickel. One blast from the past is old silent-film star Mae Marsh, in a small role as the young man’s Aunt Martha. The cast list includes one Alan Ladd, as a customer
in the army photo shop, slowly climbing the lower rungs of the ladder, and romantic interest is provided by sassy Sheila Ryan as the photo-shop girl from whose embrace the boys try and rescue young Dan. There are no ‘Great Guns’ in the movie, apart from some stock shots of cannon fire. The whole enterprise is more like a shower of squibs.
Despite all the above, the movie was a success for the Fox company and for Stan and Babe. Box office was excellent and Variety, which had often panned Laurel and Hardy when they were doing their best work, declared that Great Guns was ‘as good as any Laurel and Hardy have made … The gags run riot, and the characteristic Laurel and Hardy antic has a lot of elbow room for a hilarious workout …’
The Fox Press Book went to town on promotion, under the log-lines of: ‘THEY’RE DRAFT-DAFFY! THEY’RE DRILL-ERIOUS! YOUR FAVORITE NITWITZ WILL BLITZ YOUR BLUES AWAY!’ and ‘LOOK WHAT THE DRAFT BLEW IN!’ The publicists invited theatre owners to —
Draw a bead on the army! Near an army camp? Then slant your campaign to affect the soldiers’ attention. This is a picture about them, and they will find plenty to laugh and cheer about … fire your gun at the Laurel and Hardys in your camp — those poor fellows who are always getting into trouble … have the boys write you letters about the funniest adventures of these misfit soldiers. Limit these letters to fifty words or less, and let the writer of the best entry attend the opening night of ‘Great Guns’ as your guest together with three of his buddies …
It is not difficult to see how the looming shadows of war made both soldiers and civilians hungry for anything that would take their minds off what was just around the corner, especially if it featured old favourites. Many of the soldiers would have been weaned on Stan and Ollie. We should remind ourselves of the very different circumstances in which films were seen by audiences more than half a century ago. Where today we can endlessly reprise old classics on video and even newer media, where the 1950s and 1960s brought television to almost every home, and film buffs could run 8mm or 16mm movies in makeshift home theatres, the audience of the wartime 1940s could, in the main, see their old favourites only if they were featured in a new film. Re-releases were
rare. Today we are used to the word ‘memory’ meaning a device that preserves texts, images, sounds. In the 1940s, memory was still all in the mind. And so even a bad or indifferent Laurel and Hardy movie was better than no Laurel and Hardy movie at all.
A more direct contribution to army morale was made by Stan’s and Babe’s personal appearances at army camps around the country. In November 1941, they went further afield, on a ‘Flying Showboat’ tour, to entertain troops in Puerto Rico, Antigua, Trinidad and British Guyana — the Caribbean ‘theatre of operations’. Flying with Stan and Babe in a fleet of F-18S were Chico Marx, John Garfield, Ray Bolger, Jane Pickens and Mitzi Mayfair. This tour gave rise to an incident recorded by the FBI and quoted in my volume on the Marx Brothers, as it was filed under the name of Chico Marx. A ‘morale officer’, one Colonel Justin G. Doyle, reported a comment overheard in a Miami Hotel room, in which Mr Oliver Hardy and Mr Stan Laurel referred to their fellow touring actors Chico Marx and John Garfield as ‘the two Communists’. The po-faced ‘morale officer’ was probably unaware of a concept called ‘irony’, as contemporary photographs show the whole troupe in comradely mood with the troops. But the military’s fear of subversion, espionage, and what was becoming known as ‘fifth columnists’ was already part of the suspicious culture that would six years later spawn the rebirth of the dormant ’House Un-American Activities Committee’, and wreak havoc among Hollywood’s liberals.
The ‘Flying Showboat’ tourers returned to Los Angeles towards the end of November. On 7 December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and on 8 December the United States declared war on Japan. On 11 December Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. America was in the war now, with a vengeance …
In January Stan and Babe embarked on another countrywide tour of their ‘Driving License’ sketch, appearing in cities from Chicago to Boston. On 20 February, Babe contracted laryngitis and the boys had to shelve the tour soon after and head back to base. When they returned, Lou Breslow had a brand new script waiting for them, based on a story by co-writer Stanley Rauh. Originally titled ‘Pitfalls of a Big City’, it eventually found its way into the world under the title A-Haunting We Will Go.
No one can find any rhyme or reason for this, as there is no haunting in the movie. Rather it is a tale of gangsters and skullduggery,
with Stan and Ollie as vagrants who are being run out of town, and take on a job to deliver a coffin to a sanitarium run by a crooked doctor. Unknown to them the coffin contains the criminals’ very live pal, Darby Mason, who has to get to Dayton, Ohio, to claim an inheritance without being caught by the cops. At the train depot the coffin gets mixed up with the casket of a stage magician, Dante. On the train, Stan and Ollie get hustled by a couple of petty crooks who sell them a fake money-expanding device. Too stupid to see the con, Stan and Ollie order huge meals in the dining car, and are rescued from the dire consequences of trying to pass the fake money by the generous Dante. In return, Stan and Ollie don silly costumes and become Dante’s helpers in his act. Much havoc and confusion ensue on stage with the wrong casket; the crooks turn up and threaten our heroes; a corpse turns up in the coffin; Stan has vanished somewhere among the stage props; a detective turns up to unravel the murder; almost everybody gets caught up in a lion’s cage, and Ollie finally finds Stan, magically miniaturized inside Dante’s stage egg.
This senseless farrago was directed by veteran Alfred L. Werker, who had directed some not too terrible westerns in the 1920s and 1930s, and passable dramas, such as 1934’s House of Rothschild. (His last movie would be The Young Don’t Cry in 1957, with Sal Mineo.) Comedy was, alas, not his forte. Dante the Magician was an authentic stage act but the maestro was not a comfortable screen performer. The supporting performances were wooden, the dialogue below the standard of the weakest ‘B’ movie, and the direction somnambulant at best. The miniaturization of Stan, however, might be seen to represent another terrible moment of self-knowledge for the man who had hatched so many great gags in a career stretching back for over twenty-five years, only to end up laying this egg.
What had gone wrong? And was there some real saving magic that could put things right, even at this late stage?