V'là la flotte

TWO TARS (1928) is probably the best silent Laurel and Hardy ever made. It is hilarious. From the opening lamp-post gag, to the gumball machine, to the hilarious traffic jam and finally the train ending, this movie really is a rib-tickler. It's one of the greatest comedies ever made! Thelma Hill and Ruby Blaine are the girls, and Edgar Kennedy is the motorist whose car Laurel and Hardy promptly tear to shreds.

Laurel and Hardy's silent short Two Tars could essentially be branded as "the quintessential silent comedy," boasting a great deal of physical comedy, broad, situational comedy, early examples of breakneck slapstick, and two engaging and energetic leading men at its core. The short concerns Laurel and Hardy as your average sailors, who meet two dashing dames in the middle of town, who are having trouble operating a gumball machine (or, what they refer to as, a "doodad") since it ate their penny. Trying to assist the girls becomes a comedic affair in itself, as Hardy mistakenly breaks the doodad, with gumballs flying everywhere. Possibly one of the most famous scenes in the career of Laurel and Hardy involves Laurel slipping and sliding on a mess of gumballs that now lie on the town's sidewalk.

After ditching the mess just in time, the quartet find themselves stuck in the middle of a monstrous traffic jam, one so big, it almost, almost compares to the one we would witness in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend a few decades down the line. As always in traffic jams, tensions flair and motorists become restless, leading to unsurprisingly fun and unpredictable results. Another element of Two Tars that I neglected to mention, with it adhering to the building blocks of silent filmmaking, is that it makes complete use of its elements of unpredictability, always deceiving you in which direction you think the short would presumably go. It also helps we have such energized leads like Laurel and Hardy to make the affair that much more fun and engaging.

Two Tars can ultimately be summed up as the classic silent comedy from the 1920's, and a fine depiction of two of life's greatest challenges and patience-testers, which are pleasing women and coping in traffic jams.

Starring: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Thelma Hill, and Ruby Blaine. Directed by: James Parrott.

TWO TARS has gotten a deserved reputation as being one of the funniest of the Laurel & Hardy short comedies (and certainly among the best of their silent comedies) due to the last half of the film. Initially Stan and Ollie are on furlough from the navy, and meet two young ladies (Thelma Hill and Ruby Blaine). After some typical Hardy small talk (in which he drops his close relationship to Secretary of the Navy Curtis Wilbur), he and Stan decide to rent a car and take the girls for a drive in the country. Unfortunately their car ends up in a traffic jam.

Keep in mind that this was only 1928, and the expansion of American automobile use (from the days when the car was only the toy of the rich or the object of early racing figures like Barney Oldfield and Edward Vernon Rickenbacker) dated back only to 1914 when Henry Ford's Model T was put on the assembly line. By 1928 nearly 15 million of Ford's car was on the road - and there were other car companies too. And here we have a film (a short film comedy) which is about a traffic jam. Modern problems are always mirrored in the movies.

The series of confrontations L & H have are with equally grumpy motorists like Edgar Kennedy (whose front tires and fenders the boys manage to pull off in timed unison). Cars backs are dumped off, or they are reduced to accordions on wheels. Every possible disaster that could befall a 1928 car is shown. And the police are fairly powerless to do much, except to watch in amazement (at the conclusion) of the parade of mangled cars. And it is, surprisingly, very funny indeed.

When I first watched this at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library about 30 years ago, I remember being a bit disappointed since there was no dialogue or sound effects, this being my first exposure to a silent film in its entirety not to mention that of Laurel & Hardy without their voices. I liked it much better when I bought the VHS tape during the '90s and having now rewatched it on Hulu as linked from IMDb, I now think this is one of their near-best ever! Everything from Stan's first accident when driving to Ollie's when he takes the wheel to a bubble gum machine incident involving L & H regular Charlie Hall to that chaotic traffic jam, it's just one hilarious visual gag after another! Besides Hall, other funny supporting turns come from Thomas Benton Roberts, a prop man at Hal Roach Studios, as a man with the tomatoes, Edgar Dearing as the motorcycle cop attempting to arrest the boys, and especially Ruby Blaine as the blonde half of the girls Stan and Ollie pick up for dates who really gives it to Hall and later sprays oil on another female passerby. Ms. Blaine was reportedly a professional wrestler then appearing in near Pasadena. Thelma Hill plays the other brunette half. If you're interested in the behind-the-scenes info on this particular short, I highly recommend Randy Skretvedt's book "Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies" on which he reviews all their films (though since one of them-Hats Off-is completely lost for now, he can only mention what reviews at the time said of that). So on that note, Two Tars is highly recommended.

Part of the beauty of this perfectly paced classic comedy is not just it's gradual compounding of incident but how resonant it's plotting is today. Who likes traffic jams? Nobody! Stan and Ollie seem almost prescient to have tapped into a vexation that plagues us even now; maybe more than ever on today's superhighways that still cannot accommodate the flow of modern commuting. It is not so much the individual performances that matter here, but the over-all building of pace and piling on of incident. I think of this film every time I'm tangled in bad traffic; so will you, but please resist the temptation to rip the fender off of the car alongside you -- it may be mine.