Stan & Ollie - Laurel and Hardy deserve better than this

When I was young there were two things that were staples on the TV landscape; Laurel and Hardy comedy shorts and impressionists, usually doing impressions of Laurel or Hardy and sometimes both. Little and Large – ask your parents – pretty much made a career out of taking off Stan and Ollie.

Which brings me neatly to the crux of my antipathy towards this film; it offers no more of an insight into these two great comedians than any of those impressions. It’s two hours of Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly doing Stan and Ollie schtick, but as a film it’s puddle-deep.

If you know Laurel and Hardy, it will only make you long for their unique brand of genius; if you don’t know them – and that would be the bulk of the key movie-going demographic – you won’t be any wiser by the end.

Stan & Ollie is presented almost entirely without context. The opening preamble is a recreation of their famous dance from Way Out West (1937); it is note and step perfect but if you don’t know the film and you don’t know them then it seems a little odd. Likewise, Stan’s hospital visit to a bedridden Ollie in County Hospital (1925), recreated here as part of their stage show, is so much funnier if you understand the screen relationship between these two rather than their off-screen relationship of which we, quite rightly, knew nothing watching their films.

Their sublime moment of genius in The Music Box (1925), a film involving Stan, Ollie, a piano, and a massive flight of steps is only mentioned in passing, presumably because it would be too difficult to recreate here.

After that initial preamble and a contract row with their boss, Hal Roach (Danny Huston) though you wouldn’t know who he is from the film, we pick up our heroes in 1953 on a tour of the UK. They have been booked into second string venues by their oily promoter and are making the best of it. Stan is pinning their hopes on a version of Robin Hood which he has been writing and is keen for a British producer to finance.

As they are frustrated at every turn, they continue their death march round the country’s variety venues and the tensions in their relationship become apparent. You know however that all will be reconciled in the final reel which it duly is.

The film takes liberties with chronology. The Robin Hood film was abandoned in 1947, six years before their final tour. It also takes some cruel liberties with location – the Glasgow Empire never looked much like this.

Stan & Ollie’s saving graces come in the performances. Coogan is good as Stan with Reilly equally good as Ollie but the script only rarely allows them to be anything more than impressions. One scene in which Stan endures public humiliation in a producer’s office and another in which the boys share a bed – forerunners of those famous Morecambe and Wise skits – are frustrating glimpses of what might have been.  Likewise, Shirley Henderson and Nina Arianda, who play their wives, are the funniest things in the film following their belated arrival.

Stan & Ollie isn’t a bad film, it’s just not terribly good. It’s thin, and by the numbers, and uncinematic – it feels like those ITV biopics of Cilla Black or Bobby Moore – and Laurel and Hardy deserve better than this.

It might be a good idea to give the film a miss and spend an hour on YouTube with the real thing.