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General (Off-Topic) Discussion / Re: List of Crap #118: The 50 Best Laurel and Hardy Films
« Last post by stethacantus on Today at 05:43:49 PM »#40
CHICKENS COME HOME ( 1930 )
10 points, 1 list, #16 Darth Geek
"Don't trust any man. I've had five of 'em, and I know!"
FLASHBACK
Chickens Come Home was a remake of Love Em' And Weep, a silent Allstar comedy made three years earlier. Laurel and Hardy even used the same script, although eventually making changes for the remake. In the original, Jim Finlayson was the star, and was the politician being blackmailed. Both Stan Laurel and Mae Busch had the same roles of Finlayson's assistant and blackmailing ex respectively. And Oliver Hardy only had a minor role as a guest at Finlayson's party. In the remake, Finlayson took the smaller role as Hardy's butler. In just three years Hardy went from bit player to star, while Finlayson's fortunes went the opposite way.FIRST!
Lets go all the way back to 1986. Everyone was having fun, everyone was Wang Chung, or doin' the Super Bowl Shuffle. Oprah Winfrey and Phantom of the Opera had their first shows. Mike Tyson won his first championship Americans tried to form a human chain from the Atlantic to Pacific in the Hands Across America event, and completely forgot this country had hundreds of miles of desert. Mike Tyson won his first championship. The FOX network was launched with a woman in prison sitcom, and another show about a werewolf. A Gerbil needed to be rescued from inside a celebrity's ass, allegedly. And somewhere on the MGM lot they were just getting around to cleaning out the old movie vault that had been gathering those pesky cans of film since the 1920s. They were about to throw out some cans marked "L&H - Spanish" when someone suggested they should contact the Hal Roach library and see if they wanted them. Of course why would the Hal Roach library want Laurel and Hardy films dubbed in Spanish? They were about to tell MGM to go ahead and dump em, when someone at Hal Roach suggested they first call up film historian Richard W Bann and ask if he thought they had any value. The second Bann heard that prints of the Spanish Laurel and Hardy films were extant, he yelled over the phone not to throw them out, that they were indeed valuable. Little did Bann realize how valuable they were. He knew that in the early sound era, studios would reshoot scenes in foreign languages for the markets that didn't speak English, in effect making slightly different versions of the same film. Most of these were lost over time, and replaced with dubbed versions. He though the Laurel and Hardy Spanish films would only give us a slightly different performance from Laurel and Hardy, and would have them speaking in Spanish rather than English. But little did he know....For the first time since the 1930s the Spanish versions of the Laurel and Hardy films were screened. And to the shock of the historians watching them, they realized the Spanish versions were quite different. Some of them were longer. They had gags that the American versions didn't have. They sometimes had entirely different endings. The Spanish version of Pardon Us, for example, ends with a prison fire and Stan and Ollie rescuing the warden's daughter, while the ending on the American version has Stan and Ollie in a prison riot. ( NOTE: The version on the Essentials Collection is a hybrid of footage from both the Spanish and American versions, keeping the fire from the Spanish version instead of Stan and Ollie stopping the riot, but missing the final scene from the Spanish version where Stan and Ollie have left the prison and are planning to bootleg again. ) But perhaps the biggest shock was that some of the shorts were turned into feature films. Mostly by combining two half hour shorts into a single feature film. But then there was Politiquerias, the Spanish language version of Chickens Come Home which was expanded into a full length feature film. It was filmed and released a few months before Pardon Us, making it Laurel and Hardy's first feature film.
