Dick und Doof wie Immer auf eigene Gefahr

One of cinema's most famous comedic duos was Laurel and Hardy. Few know the two didn't team up until the late 1920's despite each having long movie careers before they were linked up forever in film lore.

Stanley Jefferson, aka Stan Laurel, made his earliest extant film, November 1918, "Just Rambling Along." A relatively newcomer to movies, Stanley had debuted in front of the camera for a demo film in late 1917 before the 28-year-old vaudeville performer was hired by Universal Picture's Carl Laemmle to play in April 1918's "Hickory Harem."

Son of an English theater manager, Stanley began as a stage pantomimist whose early claim to fame was being an understudy for young Charlie Chaplin during an American tour with The Fred Karno Troupe in 1913. Stanley Jefferson stuck around the United States after the tour and formed with two other Karno alumni "The Three Comiques," playing a Chaplin imitation. Stanley belonged to another trio act before meeting Mae Dahlberg, becoming an entertaining vaudeville couple. It was Mae who shortened Jefferson's first name to Stan. Their schtick was Mae always beating up a subserviant Stan. During a Los Angeles performance, a film producer saw their act and made a demo film seen by Laemmle and Chaplin. The former signed Stan to a Universal Pictures' movie contract in early 1918. The comedian's early screen persona was a mixed bag which really didn't solidify until he teamed up with Oliver Hardy in 1928.

Oliver Hardy had been in movies much earlier than Stan. Born Norville Hardy in Harlem, Georgia to a former Confederate soldier wounded in the Battle of Antietam, Hardy adopted his father's name Oliver as a teenager (his dad died one year after Norville was born). He worked as a Milledgeville, Georgia movie theater manager for three years before he was convinced he should be in films. Journeying to nearby Jacksonville, Florida, where the Lubin Manufacturing Company had a film studio branch there, the 21-year-older worked as a vaudeville singer in the evenings while beginning his movie career in an April 1914 debut, "Outwitting Dad." The 6-foot one-inch 300-pounder was in demand partly because his girth, earning him the nickname "Babe." His earliest surviving film is November 1914's "The Servant Girl's Legacy," the 22nd short for the Lubin Company.

By 1917 Hardy made the trip to Los Angeles, working for Vitagraph Studios. He played mostly villains during his employ with the studio, a departure from the roles he played in his early days in Jacksonville and in his later movies with Laurel.

This was part of a 3-DVD box-set, and this disc came with the other Laurel and Hardy shorts Mud & Sand, Oranges and Lemons, The Tree in a Test Tube and the Three Stooges ones Brideless Groom and Sing a Song of Six Pants; it also came with Malice in the Palace, and the features Atoll K(or Utopia) and Flying Deuces. I don't know if more than one cut of this exists, but my version was about eight and a half minutes. However, the thing itself is really 6 and 35, as the first 120 seconds were dedicated to a text intro about the female lead(and her tragic early death), Laurel taking over for... Toto?, and how this is different from the man's 20's work. Not having watched a lot of what he later made, I can't really say if that's accurate or not. This is a pretty decent effort. The situation is easy to relate to(men wanting to impress an attractive woman), and the gags largely feel natural(it's a restaurant, so of course a few tables are going to get smashed). Among the funniest moments in this are the clever jokes in the "dialog"(written, not spoken... this is silent). The slapstick is inoffensive, the "violence" the cartoon brand, where no one seems to "actually" have gotten hurt. While this is nothing special, it is a fine enough short. I recommend this to any fan of Stan. 6/10

Early in his stage career Stan Laurel worked as an understudy to Charlie Chaplin, and a strong Chaplin influence is obvious in several of Stan's solo appearances. Just Rambling Along is one of his earliest surviving works, a lightweight, modest one-reel comedy that offers only a hint of the great clown Laurel would become -- and more than a hint of Chaplin. Stan certainly looks odd here: his hair is plastered down flat, and dark makeup is smeared around his pale blue eyes in order to accentuate them, but this only makes them look paler. Frankly, he looks eerie. Stan's screen character isn't very appealing, either. He's a layabout who takes a coin from a small boy, steals food, etc., like the early Chaplin of the Keystone comedies.

Stan is more of a ladies' man in these early films, but also something of a "masher," following any pretty girl he sees and throwing himself at her. In this film as in the later short A Man About Town, some of the humor comes from Stan's efforts to chase after the girl and the girl's efforts to rid herself of him. On this occasion they wind up in a cafeteria, which provides Stan with opportunities for comic business using food, table implements, etc. The gags seem random, as if improvised while the cameras were grinding. Stan borrows Chaplin's bit from the restaurant scene in The Immigrant, using salt & pepper shakers as binoculars, but when Charlie performed the gag it felt appropriate (he was making fun of Henry Bergman's florid gestures) whereas here it just feels forced; Stan's doing it because he needs to do something funny. It's better, and funnier, when Stan samples almost all the food on offer, but orders only a cup of coffee. Just Rambling Along is of modest interest for silent comedy buffs, but serves primarily as evidence that Stan needed the partnership with Oliver Hardy to fully come into his own.

Casting notes: according to one reference source the cook behind the counter is Charley Chase, but I'm inclined to believe it's Charley's look-alike brother James Parrott, sometimes known as Paul Parrott, who later starred in his own solo series of short comedies and eventually directed some of Laurel & Hardy's best films. The big cop who chases after Stan is Noah Young, who was featured in a number of Harold Lloyd shorts and features, while the chef is played by Bud Jamison, a rotund character actor who played in support of every major comedian of the era: everyone from Chaplin, Langdon and Keaton to the Three Stooges. Stan and Bud have a nice scene together in this film, and at one point Stan appears to break character and laugh at something Bud has said. I wish we knew what it was!

Okay, this Stan Laurel film is far from great and a very far cry from the films he did with Oliver Hardy. However, when you compare it to other solo comedy shorts from the same period, this one is pretty good and has a few cute scenes plus it is far better than the slapstick films a decade earlier because this one at least has a plot (many earlier comedies didn't). But don't expect any magic here--just a few mildly funny scenes were Stan tries to sneak out of paying a restaurant bill or avoid a cop. Stan's timing on his own isn't bad but you can see why in this and other solo shorts he made he wasn't a first tier star. The policeman, by the way, was Noah Young--and you may have seen him in many of Harold Lloyd's films, as they did a lot together.

"Just Rambling Along" is a very slight but thoroughly entertaining little one-reeler. Stan Laurel, very early in his career and his association with the Hal Roach, plays a poor trickster who steals money from a child in order to have lunch with a pretty woman. Stan's character is nothing like the fully-formed and comically brilliant "Stanley" he would later play, but he does demonstrate an ability to create a character and create humor from character within the space of a ten-minute film. In fact, it's this drawing of comedy from a blend of character, situation, and inspired gag, even in its nascent form, that gives even this breezy little short the hallmark of Stan Laurel.

The sequence in which a troupe of men follow Stan's new girlfriend into the cafeteria is not too amusing and a bit of a waste of time, but happily the short's most extended sequence is its best: Stan's brilliant business of sneaking food on the lunch line while pretending to reject every dish.

This film is a fascinating curio for showing the young Stan Laurel at the very start of his film career. It's almost a wonder it survived, but I'm very glad it did.

The moral of the story for Stan: if you see a wallet lying on the ground, don't point it out to the kid sitting on the sidewalk.