Roughest Africa

This is a decent but not particularly inspired short film starring Stan Laurel in his pre-Oliver Hardy days. From the late teens until 1927, Laurel was a solo act playing with a variety of supporting actors--in this case James Finlayson. Stan plays a documentary film maker who goes to Africa to hunt wild game and make himself famous in the process. The trouble is, he isn't all that brave. The film has a few funny moments scattered about, but I really think it could have used a few more. I particularly liked the scene as his porters carry his supplies on the trek, but many of the "funny" bits didn't do much for me. As it is, it's a watchable but forgettable film.

By the way, in the 1920s audiences weren't as knowledgeable about animals of the world, though astute theater goers would have noticed that bears are NOT native of Africa nor are Asian elephants.

The interest in exploration, hunting and everything that concerned travel was intense throughout the early years of cinema and, although educational standards in the US were probably no higher than they are now, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that people in the 1920s were more ignorant about wild animals (this film is not after all intended as a zoological lecture).

The popularity of hunting/travel films increase during the twenties as a result of the boom in home-projection that followed Pathé development of the Pathé-Kok and then the Pathé-Baby (known in the US as Pathéscope), since such films were regarded as having educational value, a market that Pathé targeted for its home-projection system. The first full-length travel documentaries also appeared during the decade.

As something of a side-effect, animals became almost ubiquitous in comedy films and fictional films as well. The Thanhouser company built up its own zoo (to go with the Thanhouser Kid, the Thanhouser Kidlet and the Thanhouser Dog). Alice Guy, who ran Solax, describes in her autobiography how the studios there came to resemble a menagerie.

This was also the period when film=parodies begin to become common and some extremely good ones were made in the decade - L'Étroit Mousquetaire/The Three Must-Get-There's (1922), The Three Ages (1923), Au Secours (1924), The Frozen North (1924) or Two Wagons: Both Covered (1924), Go West (1925), Stan Laurel produced several parodies in the decade but and he could manage somewhat better than this; the best of them, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pride, a parody of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, would appear in 1925. But he was not particularly good at it and most of his efforts in this direction are fairly lamentable, not "by modern standards" - some of the unfunniest films ever made have appeared under 'The National Lampoon" banner in the last three decades - but by the standards of the good parodies being produced at the time.

Parodies are difficult to do well and require a rather special quality that few actor/writer/directors had and it is no coincidence that the parodies cited above are all by real experts - Max Linder, Buster Keaton and the multi-talented Will Rogers. Stan Laurel's real talents, as we know, lay elsewhere.

To be fair to Laurel, it is particularly difficult to produce a good parody of a film of hunting or exploration (I cannot think of an example), perhaps because such films so often come close to parodying themselves. The one thing that this film does catch rather well (in its intertitles) is the rather twee personalised "diary-style" commentaries - often self-congratulary - that such documentaries had already begun to affect (see for instance Cooper and Schoedsack's Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life which came out in 1925 but which is nevertheless a very fine documentary). This parody is too early to be based on that film or on the same directors' later Chang: a Drama of the Wilderness (1927, an account of a hunting-binge in Thailand with a plot not dissimilar to the later fictional film Elephant Boy. This far inferior film is clearly very largely a fake-up à la Flaherty and seems likely that Martin and Osa Johnson's earlier Jungle Adventures (1921), lost?, had been much in the same line and is quite a likely source for this parody.

This is an enjoyable silent, starring Stan Laurel. There is plenty of silent comedy, with the animals, but the scene with the elephant getting shot, may be disturbing nowadays. This is Stan's best solo silent comedy I have seen.

This Stan Laurel starring short is really a parody of a genre of film that doesn't exist in the same form anymore and isn't seen very much as the original: the imperialist travelogue documentary in which a self- important scientist figure satisfies the audience's curiosity about the "primitive" parts of the world.

Stan Laurel's work as a solo comedian wasn't on the whole up to his work when paired with Oliver Hardy, but he was often brilliant when burlesquing something else, and his take on the dark-continent travelogue sometimes hits some real bullseyes. In story terms there's nothing really there, but if it's a gagfest, it is a gagfest that has a good number of really inspired gags. Most of them involve some wonderful visual madness, including Stan being revealed as "fifth from the left" on a log full of monkeys, the few essentials growing more and more elaborate to incorporate a bass fiddle, a piano, and a car, and a chase with some wild animals that is shot from afar and humorously recut to make as little sense as possible.

The films being parodied here often impressed with their wild animal photography, and I think this short actually one-betters them. We get some really extremely impressive close-up shots of wild animals, and -- to all appearances -- our stars seem to be performing their knockabout comedy right around or in some cases with them. I've rarely seen film of tigers that close up, let along while someone is taking the risk of using one in a comedy routine. At one point James Finlayson really seems to have his legs caught underneath an elephant. In mocking his mark's reliance on impressive wild animal photography, Stan gives us wild animal photography just as impressive, with a layer of comedy on top.

In all, this is a very impressive short, if in some instances for reasons that may not be the most immediately apparent, timeless, typical of a comedy short.

We're all used to seeing Stan Laurel as the slightly more dimwitted half of Laurel and Hardy in brilliantly-timed gag sequences that play off their characters. This one, produced several years before his regular teaming with Mr. Hardy, is a bit different. The humor lies in the silly and pun-filled title cards and the use of animals -- about like Jules White's awful Dogville shorts of the early 1930s, but without the obvious and uncomfortable cruelty involved in those movies. If you wish to see an amusing Stanley without Ollie, here's proof that he could do other things well, even if he could be brilliant only with Hardy.