Fred Guiol | Duck Soup / 1927 || James Parrott | Another Fine Mess / 1930

renting out agnes

by Douglas Messerli

 

H. M. Walker (screen titles based on the 1908 play Home from the Honeymoon by Arthur J. Jefferson) Fred Guiol (director) Duck Soup / 1927

H.M. Walker (screenplay, based on the play by Arthur J. Jefferson), James Parrott (director) Another Fine Mess / 1930

 

Fred Guiol’s 1927 silent film Duck Soup with actors Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy was long thought to be lost, and for years, until it was rediscovered in 1974, critics thought that it consisted primarily of skits by Laurel with Hardy playing only a small part. What they discovered was that, in fact, it is one of the first real pairings of the duo similar to what a year later they would be performing for the rest of their careers together.

     In this film the pairing represents a much rougher view of the two, presenting them as determined thieves instead of the confused but basically well-meaning down-and-outers which they often later play, but as the Movies Silently blog writer argues, that already in “the quieter moments with Stan and Ollie just interacting demonstrate that something magical is happening.”

      Even the film’s details in comparison with its 1930 talking-film remake Another Fine Mess show how the script by Arthur J. Jefferson, Laurel’s father in which Stan performed on stage as a child, was later finessed to shape them as more likeable fellows. In this early version they are hobos, Hardy in particular unshaved, sitting in the park where the fire rangers are rounding up their kind to help the fire department put out a fire which evidently another hobo started. Such enforced labor was common in the early part of the 20th century, and is still used today with prison inmates called to some unruly blazes.

       The pair, observing the others being rounded up by the cops, escape via bicycle through heavy traffic to wind up in a mansion where their bike breaks down and whose open door invites them to enter. We have just witnessed the manor’s owner, Marmaduke Maltravers (James A. Marcus) abusing his butler (William Courtright) and his maid as he plans to leave on vacation. The boys overhear the servants, who have been asked to rent out the mansion in their master’s absence, the servants planning their own escape for the weekend.

      Since the rangers have by now surrounded the house, Stan and Ollie have no choice but to stay where they are, immediately taking advantage of the kitchen larder, a meal interrupted by the sound of doorbell, at the other end of which stands Lord Tarbotham (William Austin) and Lady Tarbotham (Madeline Hurlock). Quickly costuming themselves as Hardy’s recreation of Maltraver’s character, Colonel Blood and the maid Agnes (Stan), they greet the would-be renters and attempt to show them around the place, the Colonel taking the Lord in search of a game room and pool, while Agnes chats with Lady Tarbotham, is asked questions about fleas and mice, and ultimately asked to draw her a bath, in which Stan as Agnes nearly drowns.

        The jokes here are for broader and the action more frenetic than in their later works, particularly when the real owner Maltravers returns unexpectedly to retrieve something he has left behind observing that Stan and Ollie have hired a moving truck and are already busy packing up trunks of his possessions. Pulling out a gun, Maltravers shoots at everyone, our boys and the would-be renters, as he chases the gang of interlopers around the house before the forest rangers enter and cart the two off.

     Director Fred Guiol obviously didn’t quite perceive the “magic” he had created by putting the two together as a team in Duck Soup which was released in March 13, 1927.  For later that year in a July release, he had again cast them in unrelated roles in his Why Girls Like Sailors (which I discuss below) in which Hardy, totally bearded this time, plays a mean captain keen on stealing away Laurel’s girlfriend, forcing Stan, in yet another cross-dressing role, to play a woman who seduces most of the male crew away from their duties of guarding his kidnapped girlfriend.

      By 1930 in Another Fine Mess, however, they had truly become the Laurel and Hardy we know today, and producer Hal Roach was determined to remake the earlier film into a vessel more in line with their new characterizations, piloted by director James Parrott.

      This time the boys also are living in the park, making their home on a pair of benches where they also curl up for the night. But it is the police who come after them, one policeman at least, terribly offended when after telling them to leave their temporary reside, Stan has tipped his hat and called him “Ma’am.” In this case the clearly homophobic cop is truly mad, and calls up all his buddies to track down the two, who again in their attempt to escape, enter a Hancock Park mansion, just after the owner, Colonel Wilberforce Bucksot (James Finlayson) leaves for his vacation, leaving the estate’s rental in the hands of his servants, the butler Meadows (Eddie Dunn) and his maid Agnes (Gertrude Sutton) who when the master’s away determine to play on the beaches of another vacation spot.

      That once more leaves the costumed Ollie to play Colonel Buckshot and the always put-upon Stan to again don the maid’s costume to become Agnes. The British renter in this case, Lord Leopold Ambrose Plumtree (Charles K. Gerrard) who plays a toothsome constantly giggling upper class Britisher type that might make Reginald Gardiner’s—channeling Noel Coward in his The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)—imitation of Lord Cedric Bottomly envious. 

      Plumtree insists upon Buckshot showing him the billiard room, while Lady Plumtree (Thelma Todd) sits down for a strangely touching chat with the by now almost “whacky” Agnes, who keeps insisting when she utters ridiculous sentences that she’s simply nervous. Nonetheless, the Lady is so taken with Agnes that she insists that the maid come with the rental of the mansion.

      Instead of attempting to steal the mansion treasures, Hardy as Buckshot rents out the place for a few dollars a month, throwing in the maid for a few more quarters. But as before all is thwarted with the return of the real Colonel who has forgotten his bow and arrow, who finding so many strangers in the house, summons the police and also takes out a gun.

     In this instance, our daffy duo attempt their escape once more on a bicycle followed by a whole squadron of cops who chase them into a railroad tunnel, Stan and Ollie exciting on unicycles, obviously having their vehicle severed by the train met head on.

    This film wasn’t the last time Hardy would attempt to rent out Stan as Agnes, the maid; in the 1940 (filmed in 1939) release A Chump at Oxford, Agnes gets totally drunk, spills a whole tray of hors d’oeuvres upon her employer’s dress, and strips down to her panties in order to “undress the salad.”

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2022).