Eve's Love Letters

I remember feeling how weird it was in seeing Laurel without Hardy in this Hal Roach comedy, released in 1927. I kept expecting Ollie to turn up to give Stan a hand! Stan plays the butler of a household where the wife is being blackmailed after some compromising letters of hers have finished up in the wrong hands. She enlists Stan's help in finding these letters before the wife's husband finds out about them. Laurel should have been given top billing as he is the one who takes centre stage along with his leading lady. American film comedy had moved on by 1927 and "Eve's Love Letters" is an example of a slightly different kind of comedy. There are some good laughs and there is a fair bit of comic incident.

Agnes Ayres was apparently a star of feature film who is top billed in this one-off Hal Roach short. She does well as the woman at the centre of the story, but it's pretty plain that it's actually the comic mind and performing talents of Stan Laurel, who plays her butler, that make this two-reel short shine.

We start with a fairly standard plot about a woman who is being blackmailed with love letters from before her marriage, but they get destroyed fairly quickly and when she is almost caught by her husband at the blackmailer's house the comedy turns into a fast-paced, wonderfully choreographed, inventive and funny farce in which Ayres and Laurel collaborate of a series of escalating tricks to confuse and humiliate the tipsy husband.

Laurel, showcased here, is very close indeed to the "Stanley" characterization that would make him famous (as others have noted, the blackmailer is amusing named "Sir Oliver Hardy"), though a little cleverer -- he is very memorable blowinga safe with strong liquor, pantomiming floating into heaven while faking his death, and spending much of the short doing a humorously bizarre drag act while seducing the husband.

A great absurdist farce and example of Laurel at the top of his game at the top comedy studio just before his fateful teaming with the real version of Oliver Hardy.