Product Description

Laurel and Hardy can still reduce audiences to helpless laughter, as Simon Louvish attests in this chronicle of their lives and works.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #28207 in Books
• Published on: 2002-09-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Review
'This is as close as it comes to a definitive biography and filmography of Laurel and Hardy, and as good as writing about Hollywood comedy gets.' Iain Finlayson, The Times; 'An enormous amount to enjoy... contains some of the best and most incisive analysis of their movie magic I've ever read. [Louvish's] joyful descriptions of their finest films are models of clarity, and his sorrow over their decline is movingly expressed'. Bob Monkhouse, Guardian

Customer Reviews

Laurel & Hardy biography a mixed bag
Simon Louvish's epic-length biography Stan and Ollie plays like one of those Laurel & Hardy comedies that were padded to feature-length by the inclusion of romantic leads nobody cares about. Like those movies, one has to wade through a lot of guff to get to the really good stuff.

Louvish has done his research (as he all too eager to convince the reader), and it pays off most admirably when debunking previous tales of the Laurel & Hardy history. The most compelling example is the chapter detailing Oliver Hardy's first marriage. Hardy and film historians have long maintained that he moved to Jacksonville, Florida, to pursue a film career, and there was where he met and married first wife Madelyn. Louvish detailingly reveals that Madelyn was in fact Jewish, that Hardy met her in Georgia at the time of an infamous Jewish lynching, and that Hardy and his wife exited Georgia as a result, never to return.

Such dramatic payoffs are alone worth the price of the book. Louvish also often gleans much enlightened insight into Laurel & Hardy's film work (as well he should--Louvish in a part-time film teacher). To cite just one example, his analysis of the finale of L&H's penultimate Hal Roach film A Chump at Oxford is as insightful and moving as the finale itself.

Along the way, though, the reader must endure the obstacle courses that plagued Louvish's previous bios of W.C. Fields and The Marx Brothers (both of which tomes are shamelessly plugged throughout this book)... For one thing, Louvish lards his writing with precious verbosity... My final complaint with the book is that when it gets into Laurel & Hardy at their prime, it quotes other, far superior sources (most notably Randy Skretvedt's) to the point of plagiarism. And even then, accuracy is not Louvish's strong suit. Louvish quotes a Skretvedt interview with Hal Roach in which Roach, by way of contrasting L&H with other comedy teams, states that "Abbott and Costello worked at our studio, and they used to fight like hell. But with Laurel and Hardy, when I fired Hardy, Laurel cried." This quote has almost as many errors as it has words: A&C *never* worked for Roach, and Roach *never* fired Hardy (Roach had Stan and Babe on concurrent, separate contracts and often suspended Laurel or let his contract lapse during certain disputes).

For all of its faults, Louvish's genuine appreciation for Laurel and Hardy's comic artistry makes a considerable amount of Stan and Ollie worthwhile writing for the fervent L&H buff. Just make to sure to avoid Louvish's verbal land mines in order to reach the real meat of the book.

absolute gem
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I didn't feel that the retelling of the plots of Stan and Ollie's movies was 'padding' at all; these were always interesting to read, especially those that covered films I hadn't seen for many years, or at all. When I finished the book I went straight back and re-read the first chapter on the history of clowns and music-hall, and enjoyed it twice as much having learnt where it led. It's unfortunate that there wasn't more anecdotal stuff about Stan and Ollie as people to make us feel a little closer to them; most of the biographical details cover their endless divorces and remarriages - but I shouldn't complain- it must have been far more tiresome for THEM.
Of course Louvish speculates on parallels between the boys' films and their private lives but he is never tempted to over-intellectualise. His affection for his subject shines through and is contagious, and I left this book wanting to go back and re-view their films in a new light.

Interesting and informative but somewhat padded
Simon Louvish has obviously done his homework when researching this book, and there is a lot of background information about the famous duo that I, as a big fan of theirs, found very interesting. However, I felt that there was no real need for the author to spend so much time re-telling the plots of so many of their films. There isn't much point doing this, except for films that have been lost; the films themselves outdo any re-telling by about a million light-years. I also felt that the author had a tendency to do a lot of psycho-analysis of the duo based on the films. I was not wholly convinced that the conclusions he came to when doing this were justified. Sometimes it seemed as though he was trying to detract from the duo (Stan in particular) in the way he slanted the analysis. This is an interesting and informative book, but the endless re-telling of plots makes it seem over-padded and slows the pace considerably, and the psycho-analysis often seems to say more about the author than it does about Stan or Ollie.