It’s hard to over-state just how big the comedy team of Englishman Stan Laurel and American Oliver Hardy were in the 1930s and 1940s.
Steve Coogan and John C Reilly as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Photo: Supplied
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They were about the biggest thing in movies, despite – or perhaps because of – their innate modesty.
Pint-sized Stan was the gag-writer, a contemporary of Chaplin and Keaton and just as obsessively driven. Oversized Ollie – known to all his friends for some reason as “Babe” – was the essential foil, with his delicate gestures and eternal patience.
Separate, Stan and Ollie had been good. Together they were a phenomenon around the world.
But the film Stan & Ollie finds the pair near the end of their careers. Despite their films’ successes, they saw very few of the profits, most of which went into the pocket of notoriously tight-fisted studio boss, Hal Roach.
The boys are offered the chance of a late-career revival – the promise of an English movie based on Robin Hood.
And as they wait for the finances to come through, they agree to do a farewell tour of Britain.
Laurel and Hardy are played – very well under the makeup - by, respectively, Steve Coogan and John C Reilly.
But the problem with artists as well-known as Stan and Ollie is trying to capture that elusive – and often inimitable - something that made them great.
A lot of that, of course, is down to changing fashion in comedy. Five years on, most comedy reduces from “a riot” to “quite funny”.
Now try 50 years on. And part of the point of Stan & Ollie is that their old audience in 1953 had moved on from the pair’s heyday, 15 years before.
But this film isn’t really trying to revive old-school comedy sketches for generations who’ve never heard of them. It’s more about tapping into what made the duo timeless.
Can Stan and Ollie maintain their magic, under siege from run-down theatres, dodgy entrepreneurs, and their two spiky wives – Lucille Hardy and Ida Laurel?
Were Stan and Ollie themselves just a marriage of convenience, put together by the studio to make money?
Or was what we saw on the screen the real thing, despite the fine messes they regularly found themselves in?
The movie Stan & Ollie may ask these questions, but it’s clear the writer and director – Brits Jeff Pope and Jon S Baird – have already agreed on the answers.
For them Laurel and Hardy were exactly how they remembered them, and deserved a more fitting sendoff than they actually got.
Steve Coogan and John C Reilly too commit themselves fully to this rather fairy-tale version of Stan and Ollie’s last hurrah. But who wants to see a brutally realistic Laurel and Hardy film anyway?
The question “Who wants to see a Laurel and Hardy film at all in 2019” is a little harder to answer.
Comedy mostly works in the moment. Taken out of its context – pre-war Hollywood, say, or post-war Britain – with the best will in the world, it’s harder to see the joke.
Stan & Ollie is a sweet little film, but I suspect you’ll respond more strongly to the sentiment than to the slapstick.