La capra Penelope

No this is not an Ed Wood movie. "Angora Love" is Stan Laurel's and Oliver Hardy's last silent movie. The end of an era! In the '20's Laurel & Hardy left a real mark on the silent movie genre with movies that are still popular and being watched and aired regularly, this present day.

It's a shame that this movie is however not among their best.

The premise of the movie sounds good and is good. The boys team up with a goat this time, which of course leads them into trouble and for us some hilarious situations to watch. It however at the same time is extremely silly and just totally unbelievable to watch the boys doing comedy stuff with a goat. Most of the jokes in the movie still work good but the movie just however never gets truly hilarious or memorable. The comedy and story really feels lacking at times and is mostly too simple and predictable.

Of course still good and fun enough to watch for the fans but still a slightly disappointing last silent Laurel & Hardy entry.

7/10

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Although the title suggests an examination of the twisted obsessions of Ed Wood Jr., 'Angora Love' is in fact a Laurel & Hardy comedy, a diverting short which offers a heart-warming tale of two guys and the goat who refuses to leave them alone. Much of the humor revolves around the boys' efforts to hide the goat, Penelope by name, from their grouchy, goat-hating landlord, Edgar Kennedy, who gives one of his definitive grouch performances here. Apparently the premise held some special significance for Stan & Ollie, for they reworked it twice more with sound, first in the 1931 short Laughing Gravy, in which several of the gags from this film are re-enacted, and then just a year later in The Chimp, which borrows only the basic premise.

Angora Love, which was made in the spring of 1929 but not released until December of that year, was the last silent film made by Laurel & Hardy. It was originally accompanied by a music-and-effects track, but, contrary to an earlier post, there was never dialog on the soundtrack.

One of the best sequences occurs at the beginning, when the guys and the goat "meet cute." Penelope, having been fed a dough-nut by Stan, fixates on him and refuses to go away. Obviously, she wants more. The boys' attempt to give her the slip is funny and also rather poignant, at least from the goat's point of view. Cinematographer George Stevens helpfully offers us a tracking shot filmed from the goat's subjective P.O.V., or, as we might call it today, GoatCam. Once the trio is holed up in the boys' apartment the atmosphere gets somewhat claustrophobic, but the gags keep on coming. There's some silliness involving Stan's aerobics work-out, and a painful routine in which Ollie repeatedly steps on a tack. There's also an elaborately messy attempt to wash Penelope, and a sequence involving foot-rubbing which, despite the guys' innocent personalities, might strike some viewers as suggestively homo-erotic, or in any event kind of weird. There's also a quick throwaway gag involving a sailor and a prostitute that never would have gotten past the censors a few years later; it's understated but unmistakable, and not typical of Laurel & Hardy, but amusing in a raffish way.

In a sense it might have been more appropriate if Stan & Ollie had concluded their silent movie career on a spectacular note, perhaps with one of those rousing, garment-ripping riots that seemed to erupt so frequently in Culver City at the time. Still, while Angora Love is not one of the team's liveliest silent comedies, it did serve as a useful prototype for two of their talkies, and is plenty amusing in its own right.

Angora Love (1929)

*** (out of 4)

Funny two reeler has Oliver Hardy and Stan Laurel walking out of a pastry shop when a goat begins to follow them. They eventually lose the animal but two nights later he's back and the duo has to take them to their hotel room where chaos follows since the landlord is in the room below them.

This film was remade by Laurel and Hardy as LAUGHING GRAVY and that there is considered by many fans and critics to be one of the best movies the two men ever made. This one here isn't quite as good as that film but there are still enough funny moments here to make the film worth watching. The one thing I noticed while watching this is how good a sport both men were and especially during the scenes where they're trying to give the goat a bath. They really get their hands dirty so to speak and these scenes get some of the biggest laughs as does the water fight towards the end.

Having recently reviewed That's My Wife, the next film on my chronological Laurel & Hardy review list should be Big Business but I commented on that as well as Double Whoopee and Bacon Grabbers under my previous username tavm, so I'm now writing about Angora Love which happens to be the final silent L & H film. A goat leaves the pet shop he or she was displayed at and encounters Stan & Ollie just as they bought some pastry which is offered to the animal by Stan. That goat then follows them home where they have to deal with an angry landlord (Edgar Kennedy). I'll just say this was another funny one from the boys especially when things escalate, as they always do with them around, that's for sure! While the team would continue to be successful during the talkie era, when Laurel was asked years later by Boyd Verb if he had any preference between doing silents and talkies, Stan tersely replied, "Well, frankly, I preferred the silents." As Randy Skretvedt added at the end of his review of this short in his book, "Laurel and Hardy: The Magic Behind the Movies": "Making silents had been relatively easy, compared to talkies - as Laurel would find out very soon." So while I've reached the end of the silent era of 1929 in my chronological film review list, I won't move on to the talkies of that year until I review some other silents from years before that I just discovered on YouTube. So watch this space under my current username for those...

This was Laurel and Hardy's last silent film for Roach Studios. However, since the public had a real thirst for "talkies", this same short was re-made by the team just a few years later with only a few small plot changes. LAUGHING GRAVY was essentially the same plot except that Stan and Ollie were trying to hide a cute puppy from their grouchy landlord--not a goat like in ANGORA LOVE. This whole goat angle is the worst part of the film. While you could understand the boys wanting to keep a cute little dog (after all, it is snowy outside), why exactly they bring a goat home is just contrived and pointless. According to the plot, the goat followed them home and so they got tired of shooing it away and kept it. Huh?! This just doesn't make any sense--if it had been a giraffe or a cow, would they have done the same thing?! Apart from being an unconvincing plot, the movie itself is pure Laurel and Hardy, with a familiar plot and familiar roles for the comedians. This film features quite a few laughs, but unfortunately isn't one of their better films to wrap up their silent careers. This aspect of their careers just seems to have ended with a whimper.