Laurel and Hardy: Year One

Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy first appeared on film together in 1921. The two formally teamed up in 1927 and became the legendary comedy team by following a simple comic formula that displayed the hilariously ambitious and anarchic qualities of their joint personality. Laurel & Hardy: Year One presents four of their newly restored silent films: Duck Soup, Flying Elephants, Putting Pants on Phillip and The Battle of the Century.

In Duck Soup (1927), Stan and Ollie share the screen as true co-stars for the first time in this long-lost comedy short, playing vagrants who hide out in an empty mansion to evade a firefighting draft and then must deal with prospective renters.

Flying Elephants (1928) centers Stan and Ollie as cavemen, in pre-historic times, vying for the affections of the same stone age beauty.

In the hilarious Putting Pants on Philip (1927), pompous J. Piedmont Mumblethunder greets his kilt-wearing Scottish nephew – he is immediately taken to a tailor for a pair of “proper pants.”

The Battle of the Century (1927), for decades a partially-lost film, has boxer Stan managed by Ollie, who takes out an insurance policy on his puny fighter. He then tries to engineer an “accident” that ends in the epic pie-fight-to-end-all-pie-fights (3,000 pies were reportedly used in the skirmish).

Very few original negatives of the silent films of Laurel and Hardy survived, and the available elements scattered throughout the world were mostly unwatchable. After three years gathering all the surviving prints of these shorts, comparing them shot by shot and giving them the best digital restoration possible, these invisible films look as young as they did 95 years ago. The films new scores from some of the best silent film composers working today: Neil Brand, Antonio Coppola, Eric le Guen, and Donald Sosin.

Rialto Cinemas is thrilled to present these beautifully restored shorts on the big screen for Silent Movie Day: Sunday, September 29.