No, Atoll K isn’t utopia. But it’s a nice place to visit two old friends.

‘Atoll K deserves at least a polite round of applause for being something different.’ — Scott MacGillivray, Laurel & Hardy From The Forties Forward

‘…a courageous effort to do something different, and in this respect at least it was a far more worthwhile venture than most of their later U.S. releases.’ — William K. Everson, The Films of Laurel & Hardy

‘Weep, indeed, for the frightful vision of what was once the comic glory of the motion picture.’ — Simon Louvish, Stan and Ollie, The Roots of Comedy

‘Laurel and Hardy’s last film, to put it pleasantly, is a mess. Occasionally a nice mess, but mostly a messy mess.’ — John McCabe, Laurel & Hardy

Anyone who knows me knows I have a fondness for (aka fascination with) Laurel & Hardy's last film, "Atoll K" (aka Robinson Crusoeland, aka Utopia).  

The film, produced in France under ridiculously difficult circumstances and designed to jumpstart both the post-war Europe movie industry and Laurel & Hardy's languishing cinematic career, is the most divisive title in the L&H canon. Admirers of Stan & Babe have very strong opinions of the film – good, bad, but never, ever indif­ferent. Some people can't get past the first few minutes. Others steadfastly refuse to ever see it, period. 

Then there's me. Read on.

Now anybody even slightly familiar with the lives of Laurel & Hardy knows the story behind Atoll K, so I won't get into the gory details behind the making. (But if you're interested in said details, I have a great suggestion at the end of this post!) 

Long before the invention of $1 DVDs, where 'Utopia' reigns ubiquitous, I was fascinated by this once impossible-to-see film. I'd first read about it when I was discovering Laurel & Hardy in William K. Everson’s ‘Films of Laurel & Hardy’. Right away I fixated on Atoll K – probably in the same way someone is drawn to a car wreck. The ghoulish photo of Stan, the bizarre storyline, the fact that it was so far removed from any of their earlier work… I had to see it. It took a few years, but I finally caught a 16mm screening at the Dearborn Michigan public library. And I loved it. Why? 

From the classic me-before-you-Stanley entrance, they immediately felt like my friends Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy. Forget that they’re old. Forget that they’re sick. Forget that they’re in an unfamiliar land with unfamiliar people. After years of exile, Stan and Ollie are back. They’re not, as Charles Barr called them in his book ‘Laurel & Hardy’, ‘…like two old end-of-the-pier comedians doing a Laurel and Hardy imitation’. They are Stan and Ollie, with us again after far too long. There is more genuine Laurel & Hardy comedy in the first twelve minutes of this film than in their entire Fox/MGM output.

Okay, so you can’t forget they’re old and sick. Seriously, how can you? I mean, look at poor Mr. Laurel. But, you know what? He puts more enthusiasm into this film than all of the post-Roach films he sleepwalked through, put together. As for Mr. Hardy, any boyish expressiveness that critics of Atoll K claim Babe lacks by 1950 was well lost by 1938 – Swiss Miss seems to be the film where his cheeks squished his eyes into a permanent squint. But he gets some marvellous camera looks in (and welcome back to those!) and absolutely beams during his entrance. So here they are, getting tangled in each other’s clothes, Stan spreading jam on Ollie’s hand, splashing in wa­ter, pratfalling onto watermelons, baffling themselves with machinery. Older. Much, much older. But no wiser. Welcome back, Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy. 

"Yoo hoo!" Watch the scene by clicking here.

The teamwork is as sharp as ever. Let’s examine one gag, a gag that’s often criticized as a ‘fat’ joke made at Babe’s expense. Onboard their newly inherited "yacht", Stan finds an inflatable raft, which Ollie explains will hold four people. Stan ponders this for a second, then responds, ‘What about me?’. If this had been Abbott & Costello, or the Three Stooges, or Martin & Lewis, or even the Fox/MGM version of Laurel & Hardy, the remark would have been handled with a quick, angry shove. But look at the way it’s treated here. Stan insults Ollie – Why? He’s not making a wise­crack. He’s voicing a valid (in his mind) concern, but right away he regrets it – almost mid-sentence. And Ollie is hurt. Deeply. This genuinely upsets Stan. Even his conciliatory ‘yoo hoo’ won’t get his friend to look at him. Finally, he holds a hanky up to blot Ollie’s tears. Bringing the tissue to his nose, Ollie instinctively blows… only to catch himself. Then comes the angry shove. That single minute of film is the perfect précis of the the relationship between Stan & Ollie  –  the most beautiful bromance in the history of cinema. 

There’s also an interesting dynamic in this film. Stan and Ollie actually have friends. Oh, they've had friends before: ‘Mr. Bernard’ in Any Old Port, ‘Baldy’ in Be Big. Then there’s the boy ingénues who are bud­dies only for the purpose of plot: whiny Alan Douglas in Bonnie Scotland, expendable Eddie Smith in Pack Up Your Troubles. But generally it’s Stan and Ollie against the world. Now, when it’s the world against Stan and Ollie, they have three confederates who actually support and – surprise! – respect the boys. When Ollie takes authority as President, it’s accepted. It gives them a humanity they hadn’t had in years – the humanity that originally set them apart from the other silent comics almost a quarter century earlier, and the human­ity that 20th Century Fox bragged they were recap­turing (but bungled so badly) in 1941. Atoll K presents a mature version of the Stan and Ol­lie we originally met in 1928. Not the broad, white-faced clowns of the later Roach films. Not the stodgy dullards of the Fox/MGM years. Perhaps that’s why I like Atoll K so much: Not because of what the film contains, but what it promises. It proves that the boys never lost their comic touch, or their innate sense of who these two characters were. It shows that Laurel & Hardy could have matured and, to me, makes the ten lost years since they left Roach all the more tragic. This is the Laurel and Hardy that could have been. That should have been. 

I wouldn’t have missed this final visit for the world. 

An early version of this blog post was originally published in Nieuwe Blotto Magazine. For a fascinatingly in-depth exploration of the making of Atoll K, I hugely recommend Norbert Aping's 'The Final Film of Laurel and Hardy: A Study of the Chaotic Making and Marketing of Atoll K'. The author acknowledges the overuse of variations on the word 'fascinating' in this post.

The English Language version.
Buy it here from McFarland Press.

The German Language version.
Tons more pictures but, well, it's in German.
Buy it here from Schüren Verlag.

Growing Up Scribe (or, The Face Launched a Life)

I’ve been captivated so many times in my life. Oh so many times. So many times I can’t remember them all. But I can specifically recall the very first time in my life I was mesmerized. I was 10 years old. And it was by this face:

Let’s start at the beginning. If you were a kid, like me, growing up in Canada in the 1970s, you were fed a steady diet of National Film Board of Canada product in school. These films were pure, undistilled Canadian propaganda, scratchy, splicey, thick-as-maple-syrup reinforcements of your heritage like “The Log Jammer’s Waltz” or the scratch animations of Norman McLaren.  Kinda boring for a 10-year old but, when that 16mm Bell & Howell projector was wheeled into the classroom, at least you knew you didn’t have to learn anything for the next half hour or so… Eventually, the schoolday matinee was an NFB production called “The Railrodder” – by all expectations, yet another cut and dried “hooray for Canada” epic showing us big pine trees, wide open prairies, and majestic mountains, from Atlantic to Pacific. But who was looking at the splendour of our Dominion when there was this…

It didn’t take long for the aforementioned mesmerization (yep, it’s a word) to strike. My god, look at that man’s face. The huge, world weary eyes. The unsmiling, resigned-to-fate countenance. The underlying look of determined curiosity. I’d never seen anything like it before. It wasn’t funny, it was haunting. Baffling. Beautiful. I was all in.Buster. Keaton. Suddenly, drawing this odd man became a fixation. Art projects were watercolours of Buster jumping into the Thames River, or Buster in faux Group of Seven (remember, this is Canada in the ‘70s) facsimiles. Art teachers were not impressed. Fast forward one year. My homeroom teacher (for history’s sake, his name was Mr. Dearing) screened another yet 16mm film. Not from the NFB, this time. This one was called “The General”. And it wasn’t in colour. It was black & white. A few minutes in, my keen, perceptive eye told me, “Wait, a minute, it’s that same guy! But he’s young!” From there, of course, logic dictated that this “Buster Keaton” man was someone who made movies on trains where you didn’t talk. Well, that was weird thing for a guy to do. I became curiouser and curiouser. 

Now around this same time, something else came along. Old two-reelers on Channel 9 in Windsor. Suddenly, The Three Stooges, The Little Rascals and Laurel & Hardy were frequent visitors to my brainpan. Oh, on occasion, that strange old man would show up on TV – in 4 pm after-school airings of “War, Italian Style” or “How To Stuff a Wild Bikini” – but for the most part I was enthralled by Larry, Moe and Curly, Spanky and Alfalfa, and Stan & Ollie. Oh boy, Stan & Ollie. I couldn’t get enough of them. (Still can’t, which you’ll probably find out in future postings, but I digress.)

That said, if Laurel & Hardy became my obsession, Buster Keaton was my archangel. Here's why:

”The Railrodder" made me what I am today. I have no idea what I’d be, where I’d be, who I’d be, if I’d never seen that film. It triggered an all-encompassing infatuation with comedy. W.C Fields, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, Lloyd, Abbott & Costello, Harry Langdon, Larry Semon, you name them. Easy Street, Saturday Afternoon, Cops, Bumping Onto Broadway.  From there, it fell like dominoes. When it wasn’t slapstick films (Blackhawk 8mms, so many Blackhawk 8mms!), it was old-time radio. When it wasn’t radio, it was cartoons… is there anything greater than Fleischer Popeyes? That turned into a desire to be a cartoonist. I went to college to learn advertising design and illustration. When I graduated without the least ability to get a job in that field, the accumulated hours and hours of radio comedy was my salvation. I dredged up everything I learned from listening to Jack Benny, Fibber McGee & Molly and Burns & Allen and got a job writing radio commercials.

Then, one bored weekend, I took a trip to Toronto and, it being the era of SCTV and SNL, took in an improv comedy show. In that dank basement theatre, I was mesmerized a second time – by a devastatingly funny woman. Y’know what I did? I quit my job, moved to the big city and took improv classes at Second City. Long story short, blah blah blah, I got a new job writing ad copy, climbed the agency ladder and, arguably, succeeded. In the years since I’ve traveled to Los Angeles, Washington, Italy, Holland – even to Syracuse – where I’ve hobnobbed with people who were similarly affected by Buster and his confederates. I even spent a few hours one autumn day at the home of Gerald Potterton, the (amazing and generous) man who directed “The Railrodder”. Oh, and I married that devastatingly funny woman. This year we celebrate  our 30th anniversary.

To which I can only say, thanks funny strange old man who makes movies on trains where you don’t talk. 

The end.

Watch "The Railrodder" here. Go. Now. I insist.