Back when I was collecting Super-8mm prints of old movies in the 1970s, a friend of mine who'd been traveling in Europe returned with a real find: an early talkie in which Stan and Ollie speak French! Their phonetic French sounds as awkward as you'd imagine, but the novelty sure does boost the viewing experience. I screened Les Carottiers several times for friends. On one particular occasion when native speakers of French were present, the movie scored a huge hit. I was told afterward that Laurel & Hardy recited their lines like kids in a school play, which suits their characters nicely. This fascinating oddity is quite funny and well worth seeing, but remains a rarity. Unless someone puts out a DVD collection of Laurel & Hardy's foreign language releases -- and I hope someone will -- these films are hard to find. Meanwhile, the background on the circumstances under which they were made is rather interesting.
In the early talkie days, before dubbing or subtitling had been perfected, some of the Hollywood studios experimented with shooting alternate versions of certain features and shorts in various European languages. Producers could hire an entirely new group of actors (as with the Spanish Dracula, Carlos Villarias, and his co-stars) or simply utilize the language skills of such stars as Greta Garbo, who played Anna Christie in both English and German. A third possibility was to have the actors memorize their lines phonetically, assisted by off-camera chalkboards. This method would have made serious drama laughable, but comedies were enhanced by the stars' struggles with unfamiliar tongues. Les Carottiers (loosely, "The Chiselers") is a pseudo-feature that consists of two short films, Be Big and Laughing Gravy, spliced into a somewhat disjointed whole, linked by a single silent film-style title card which ties the stories together. Anita Garvin repeats her role as Mrs. Laurel from the English language version of Be Big, but the French Mrs. Hardy is a different actress. Charlie Hall repeats his roles from the English versions of both films: he's a delivery boy in the first half and, more prominently, the dog-hating landlord in Part Two. As the clean-shaven delivery boy Hall recites his lines phonetically, but in his second role he mimes his part while a gruff-voiced French actor delivers his lines off-camera, an approach made credible by the bushy mustache Hall wears that obscures his mouth.
So much for background. How does this oddity hold up today? Well, the second half is quite funny if you last that long. The first half, Be Big, is frustratingly unfunny in any language, and serves as a kind of litmus test of the viewer's tolerance for Laurel & Hardy's style of comedy. Most of the action consists of Ollie laboring to yank off a pair of too-tight boots, and even the novelty value of French dialog fades fast, as so much of it consists of grunts and yowls. But stick around and you'll be able to enjoy the team's most successful variant on a favorite motif: the struggle to keep a pet in lodgings where animals are not welcome. In Angora Love the boys were stuck with a fragrant goat, and in the featurette The Chimp they were the reluctant keepers of a circus gorilla, but in both of those stories the animals were unpleasant and unwanted in the first place. Here the animal in question is a sweet, scruffy little dog, so the struggle to protect him from eviction engages our sympathy more than in the other films. It's winter, it's cold outside, and the mean-spirited landlord wants to pitch their adorable pooch out into the snow.
As in the English language version much of the humor is essentially silent, and what dialog there is in Les Carottiers can be pretty easily followed whether you speak French or not, at least until the final sequence. Happily, LeRoy Shields' delightful background music was retained, including the melancholy "Dog Song." The biggest change from the familiar version of Laughing Gravy to be found here is the radically different ending -- which, I gather, follows the script originally intended for the English language version. Instead of the smallpox quarantine and landlord Hall's abrupt off-screen suicide (!!?!) Les Carottiers veers into something completely unexpected: Stan receives word that his rich uncle has died and left him a fortune, with the stipulation that he parts with Ollie, who the uncle blames for Stan's lowly status. After his initial shock passes, Ollie sadly urges Stan to accept the terms and go, but insists on keeping the dog. Stan tears up his uncle's letter and check and elects to stay -- but only for the sake of Laughing Gravy!
This finale is quite talk-y, and struggling with all that complicated dialog must have been a real chore for Stan and Babe, funny as it is to hear them now. Beyond that, the last-minute inheritance twist is out of keeping with the tone of the rest of Laughing Gravy, which mostly consists of slapstick sequences: hurling tubs full of water, falling off the roof into a rain barrel, etc. During this final sequence we suddenly seem to be in a different kind of movie, and it's not a very satisfying pay-off; perhaps that's why it was cut from the English language version. Oh well. Whatever the case, this film is a fascinating thing to see. Now why can't more people see it? Who holds the rights to these things?
P.S. Early 2007: I'm pleased to report that this film has been included in the 21-disc Laurel & Hardy box set available in the U.K., along with several of the boys' other foreign language releases.
In the early talkie days, before dubbing or subtitling had been perfected, some of the Hollywood studios experimented with shooting alternate versions of certain features and shorts in various European languages. Producers could hire an entirely new group of actors (as with the Spanish Dracula, Carlos Villarias, and his co-stars) or simply utilize the language skills of such stars as Greta Garbo, who played Anna Christie in both English and German. A third possibility was to have the actors memorize their lines phonetically, assisted by off-camera chalkboards. This method would have made serious drama laughable, but comedies were enhanced by the stars' struggles with unfamiliar tongues. Les Carottiers (loosely, "The Chiselers") is a pseudo-feature that consists of two short films, Be Big and Laughing Gravy, spliced into a somewhat disjointed whole, linked by a single silent film-style title card which ties the stories together. Anita Garvin repeats her role as Mrs. Laurel from the English language version of Be Big, but the French Mrs. Hardy is a different actress. Charlie Hall repeats his roles from the English versions of both films: he's a delivery boy in the first half and, more prominently, the dog-hating landlord in Part Two. As the clean-shaven delivery boy Hall recites his lines phonetically, but in his second role he mimes his part while a gruff-voiced French actor delivers his lines off-camera, an approach made credible by the bushy mustache Hall wears that obscures his mouth.
So much for background. How does this oddity hold up today? Well, the second half is quite funny if you last that long. The first half, Be Big, is frustratingly unfunny in any language, and serves as a kind of litmus test of the viewer's tolerance for Laurel & Hardy's style of comedy. Most of the action consists of Ollie laboring to yank off a pair of too-tight boots, and even the novelty value of French dialog fades fast, as so much of it consists of grunts and yowls. But stick around and you'll be able to enjoy the team's most successful variant on a favorite motif: the struggle to keep a pet in lodgings where animals are not welcome. In Angora Love the boys were stuck with a fragrant goat, and in the featurette The Chimp they were the reluctant keepers of a circus gorilla, but in both of those stories the animals were unpleasant and unwanted in the first place. Here the animal in question is a sweet, scruffy little dog, so the struggle to protect him from eviction engages our sympathy more than in the other films. It's winter, it's cold outside, and the mean-spirited landlord wants to pitch their adorable pooch out into the snow.
As in the English language version much of the humor is essentially silent, and what dialog there is in Les Carottiers can be pretty easily followed whether you speak French or not, at least until the final sequence. Happily, LeRoy Shields' delightful background music was retained, including the melancholy "Dog Song." The biggest change from the familiar version of Laughing Gravy to be found here is the radically different ending -- which, I gather, follows the script originally intended for the English language version. Instead of the smallpox quarantine and landlord Hall's abrupt off-screen suicide (!!?!) Les Carottiers veers into something completely unexpected: Stan receives word that his rich uncle has died and left him a fortune, with the stipulation that he parts with Ollie, who the uncle blames for Stan's lowly status. After his initial shock passes, Ollie sadly urges Stan to accept the terms and go, but insists on keeping the dog. Stan tears up his uncle's letter and check and elects to stay -- but only for the sake of Laughing Gravy!
This finale is quite talk-y, and struggling with all that complicated dialog must have been a real chore for Stan and Babe, funny as it is to hear them now. Beyond that, the last-minute inheritance twist is out of keeping with the tone of the rest of Laughing Gravy, which mostly consists of slapstick sequences: hurling tubs full of water, falling off the roof into a rain barrel, etc. During this final sequence we suddenly seem to be in a different kind of movie, and it's not a very satisfying pay-off; perhaps that's why it was cut from the English language version. Oh well. Whatever the case, this film is a fascinating thing to see. Now why can't more people see it? Who holds the rights to these things?
P.S. Early 2007: I'm pleased to report that this film has been included in the 21-disc Laurel & Hardy box set available in the U.K., along with several of the boys' other foreign language releases.
