James W. Horne | Way Out West / 1937

eating hardy’s hat

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charley Rogers, Felix Adler, and James Parrott (screenplay, based on a story by Jack Jevne and Charley Rogers; with uncredited contributors San Laurel, James. W. Horne, and Arthur V. Jones), James W. Horne (director) Way Out West / 1937

 

The majority of critics and film historians name Way Out West as Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy’s best feature film, and I’m perfectly willing to go along with that. Despite the claim of some that there no boring moments in this work, I’m not willing to describe it as flawless, and yes, in the midst of the night raid on the local saloon I took a few yawns, particularly while the supposedly clever villains of this work, saloon owner Mickey Finn (James Finlayson) and his wife singer/dancer Lola Marcel (Sharon Lynn), seem far more dense and even stupid than their seemingly previous cleverness belied. But even these scenes are humorously ingenious, with Stanley cooking up some of the most ridiculous ways possible to silently enter the establishment and retrieve the deed to the mine they have mistakenly handed over to Finn and Marcel, puts Hardy through literal physical torture by hoisting him up into midair, dropping him through a roof, and latter putting a cellar door through his head.

     Their mistake was to have believed the evil Finn when he introduced his wife as Mary Roberts, the young daughter of their prospector friend who Finn and Marcel keep as a near slave in the kitchen, and to whom Stan and Ollie were supposed to deliver up the deed for the richest gold mine in the West. When the Boys discover what they have done, they spend the rest of the film attempting to correct their error, a goal at which they ultimately succeed, for one of the first times in their career not being left with a mess on their hands.

 

     And most of the work keeps us laughing when not, at moments, absolutely delighting in the previously hidden dancing and singing talents of this popular duo. Perhaps the most very charming of the scenes is when first coming upon the Brushwood Gulch saloon they encounter the Avalon Boys outside singing J. Leubrie Hill's "At the Ball, That's All," the pair first listening to a couple of choruses before they can no longer resist joining together in a dance that continues for a rather long while. No such dance, film historians tell us, existed in the original script, but came about quite obviously as the entertainers got the idea to adlib the dance, rehearsing it carefully before the next shoot of the scene. It is one of the greatest moments of their careers and summarizes both their comical genius and their natural pairing as a couple.

      Indeed, by this time, in the late 1930s Stanley and Ollie were clearly a steady couple in the manner of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet before them and Samuel Beckett’s Mercier and Camier after, the latter of whom, in fact, where clearly influenced by the movie couple.

     And just as Flaubert and Beckett make no secret of their sexual pairing as well, so by this time it is clear that the “long jawed” “model of a complete dolt” Laurel, as The New York Times reviewer Frank S. Nugent described him, remains in intellectual awe and under the physical control of his long-term partner, a figure who, according to Nugent, automatically arranges his “dimples into a perfect pattern of pained resignation.” Indeed, Nugent describes their work as a “humor of anatomy.” And there is plenty of evidence in this work precisely of that fact. Some examples arise simply from the logical proportions of their body, the fact, for instance, that every time he fjords a small river Laurel and the mule walk across with only their legs and feet getting wet, while far heavier Hardy drops out of sight into a hole mid-stream, arising with an entire wet body, his clothes needing to be stripped from his body and air-dried.

     Indeed, at one point to remove a small pendant from his neck which becomes lost within the massive folds of his clothing, Stan quite literally undresses him in front of others, pushing his hand under the front of his pants several times as if about to grab the large man’s penis.

     At another point, when Ollie sits down on a chair, Stan, instead of choosing another chair, sits upon his friend’s knee as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It is only Ollie’s sense of decorum that sends him hurrying off into a more appropriate location.

      Again, indicating his role of the feminine, when the two fail to stop a small coach to take them and their mule into town, Stanley, in a lovely parody of Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night  (1934) when Claudette Colbert teaches Clark Gable how to hitchhike, he rolls up his pants to the knee and dangles his thigh beguilingly which brings the local stagecoach to a complete halt—hinting at just how horny these western men were the company of a shapely woman or someone who even tangentially could remind them of one.

      After watching this couple now for more than a decade live in the same house, sleep in the same bed—even while Hardy was supposedly married—and even care for a child together, let alone seeing Stan dress up as a woman several times upon Hardy’s request, we recognize them as being far more than mere friends, a fact which even Joseph Breen and the Production Code could not erase from our minds.

     When we watch Stanley leading a mule that carries all their cookware and foodstuffs while Ollie rides, asleep, on a travois that drags behind, we recognize that like most women in the world—a role which this film satirizes even as it still maintains its evil presumptions—it is Ollie’s job to look after and care for his man. He no longer even whines in discontent as he formerly did in their short movies. And he’s a wiz at mending things, drying Ollie’s continually wet suit, and even starting a fire, in surreal moments, by rubbing his thumb against his inner hand like a cigarette’s wheellock to produce the desired flame, an act that amazes Ollie until suddenly, achieving the same effect, he is terrified by his flaming finger.

      Hardy and his directors need no longer even put Stan into drag; we know where things stand in their relationship, reiterated in their lovely singing of "Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” Ollie begins the song after it’s been started by the Avalon Boys, singing the first chorus quite beautifully, before Stan joins in. At one moment, however, Stan takes over, singing a line in a deep bass voice (actually the voice of Chill Wills); when Ollie looks at him disapprovingly and attempts to correct the matter, Stan sings the next part of phrase in a high soprano voice (dubbed by Rosina Lawrence), which Ollie can tolerate.

      If this isn’t a gay film, in other words, I’ll eat Hardy’s hat—but then I almost forgot, Hardy has commanded his companion to do just that, Stan complying the best he can. I might remind the reader than according to the urban dictionary that phrase not only means that one is positively convinced of something but is a street metaphor for wanting to make out or sleep with someone of an attractive nature (as in “Oh yah, I’d totally eat his hat.”), although I won’t go so far claiming that that’s what the writers meant by having Stan take bites of the item that covers Ollie’s crown.

     Besides, it doesn’t matter. By film’s end, they’re off on another adventure together, accompanying the now wealthy Mary Roberts back to her Southern birthplace, while singing “Dixie.”

 

Los Angeles, September 1,2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).