Few film scholars elevated the 1929 short “Wrong Again” to classic status, but I’m willing to go out on a limb to suggest it deserves such an honorific classification. It was among the last wave of Laurel and Hardy’s silent output and had three future Oscar winners behind the camera – director Leo McCarey, cinematographer George Stevens, and screenwriter Lewis R. Foster – plus one of the most wonderfully original sight gags of all time.
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Sometimes when you least expect it, a dramatic or comedy film suddenly erupts into a musical number. For the sake of listicle distraction, here are 10 musical numbers from non-musical films that should get you singing along when you least expect it.
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MGM’s 1930 film “The Rogue Song,” an adaptation of the Robert Bodansky-A. M. Willner operetta “Gypsy Love,” was the only sound-era production included on the American Film Institute’s 1980 list of the ten most wanted lost films. The inclusion of this title on the list was peculiar at many levels. For starters, its presence as the sole post-silent era entry, it inadvertently gave the wrong impression that few sound-era films were lost.
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The other day, I saw a post on Facebook asking for input on whether the 1944 Laurel and Hardy feature “The Big Noise” deserved to be considered among the worst films ever made. After all, many Laurel and Hardy aficionados label it as the duo’s on-screen nadir, and it was also cited in a book that allegedly ranked the all-time 50 worst films.
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BOOTLEG FILES 800: “Nirvana” (re-edited version of the 1951 Laurel and Hardy feature “Atoll K”).
LAST SEEN: Available for private request screenings.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: A bit of a copyright issue.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Probably not.
Before I begin this week’s column, I want to pause and point out that this is the 800th entry in The Bootleg Files series that began in September 2003 on Film Threat before becoming part of Cinema Crazed in February 2017. My goodness, I cannot believe that there have been 800 entries in this weekly column! I need to give my deepest and sincerest thanks to Felix Vasquez Jr., publisher and editor at Cinema Crazed, for providing The Bootleg Files with a loving home, and I need to thank the readers of this long, long, long-running series for checking in with me every Friday – I’ve ton too much writing in the course of my career, but this is the achievement that has been the true labor of love. Okay, enough gushing – on with the show!
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Were Laurel & Hardy’s final stretch of films at 20th Century Fox and MGM plus the French “Atoll K” really as bad as many critics insist? On this “Online Movie Show” episode, film historian Geno Cuddy offers insight on whether Stan and Ollie deserved better from the the critics.
With “Stan & Ollie” now in theaters, fans might find the newest release from Mill Creek of some interest, as it gathers a lot of interesting relics from Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. While it by no means features some of their best shorts and features, it definitely will spark some conversation by hardcore movie buffs, as it includes a list of movies that feature both comedic actors, and their shorts and films that they worked on as solo performers. It’s not the best collection but it’s a fascinating release that will help fans of the comedy team dissect a lot of the work that both men did outside of their team as well as what worked, and what just didn’t.