The Sleuth

This is a very strange yet enjoyable comedy short starring Stan Laurel before being ultimately teamed with Oliver Hardy. He plays a private eye and a lady comes to her house and wants her husband investigated--she thinks he's a crook and a womanizer. The film is filled with quite a few funny gags and one you absolutely must see to believe is Stan dressed as a vamp!! It's rather disturbing how good he looks actually! In addition, there are lots of cute gags once he meets up with the husband's gang--involving Stan getting bonked on the head but ultimately culminating with his defeating the gang and saving the day. Sure, this isn't the most intellectual silent comedy, but with so much energy and fun, you can't help but laugh!

An early short Stan Laurel made for Joe Rock a few years before he hooked up with Oliver Hardy, this half-baked comedy is fairly typical of the sort of material Laurel was producing back then. This one's a parody of Sherlock Holmes with Stan playing Webster Dingle, a hapless private eye complete with an over-sized pipe and equally over-sized checks on his jacket. He dresses up as a maid in this one to entrap a philandering husband. Amongst the dross there is one genuinely funny moment – when the visitor he has been trying to impress by holding an imaginary conversation on the phone turns out to be the phone engineer come to connect him – and one mildly amusing sequence when he follows his own footsteps in the house of his target. The quality of the print that I saw was bad enough to hurt the eyes.

Here's a fast, fun, and very disjointed Stan Laurel comedy. The setup is well-worn and basic: woman hires detective Stan Laurel to catch her philandering and criminal husband. Craziness follows immediately. You might think you've seen the film before when the sleuth's first idea is to catch the husband by dressing in drag, but Stan Laurel, playing a very different character than the one that would bring him fame next to Oliver Hardy, adds a lot of panache to the performance and makes it very funny instead of tired. His comic mind works the same magic with a great vase-over-head sequence, and the gag that follows after Stan steps in some spilt powder is hilarious and memorable. Glen Cavender as the husband gives Stan-in-drag some disturbing leers.

'The Sleuth', directed by my friend the late Joe Rock, is a starring vehicle for Stan Laurel pre-Hardy. Laurel is excellent here, playing a character quite different from his later 'Stanley' dimwit. He's Webster Dingle, a private detective. Alberta Vaughn walks into his office; her husband (Glen Cavender, excellent) is a flirt and a crook, so she wants Laurel to arrest him. (For which offence, please?)

Laurel infiltrates the household as a parlourmaid! Stan Laurel was one of the few male comedians who could plausibly impersonate a woman (another such was Roscoe Arbuckle), and he's an absolute delight here in his maid's uniform and wig. Daringly, when we first see Laurel in female garb in this movie, he's standing with his back to the camera and wearing a hat -- thus drawing attention to the size and shape of his male body rather than relying on female cosmetics or a feminine hairstyle -- and yet he's still passable as a woman. In this scene, Laurel also uses a capelet to minimise his male shoulders ... but he didn't need it! In a later sequence, once again in female disguise, Laurel vamps the villains in an outfit that exposes his bare arms and shoulders ... and he's STILL believable as a woman!

Most of Laurel's performance in this film -- in various disguises, male and female -- is quite subtle and funny, but he still can't resist a bit of the hand-to-brow histrionics of his earlier and coarser comedies. Laurel also has one 'impossible' gag here that's badly done: after exiting a shot from the left side of the screen, he almost instantly re-enters at the right side of the screen. I wasn't expecting this, so I didn't watch for a jump cut. However, he killed the gag a few seconds later in the same shot, when he AGAIN exited at the left and then AGAIN re-entered at the right. This time, because I was expecting it, I spotted the join in the jump cut. Film-making 101: never do the same trick twice the same way; your audience will spot it the second time.

There are some truly hilarious gags here, with female hands constantly snatching off Laurel's various disguises. I laughed uproariously at one sequence, when a whole band of Cavender's henchmen queue up to cosh Laurel ... and he uses an amazingly effective trick to make them all cosh each other instead. Very funny! I'll rate 'The Sleuth' 9 out of 10. Laurel's performance here is very different from his Stan-and-Ollie turns, and 'The Sleuth' is easily much funnier than some of the poorer Laurel and Hardy comedies.

Although he had been starring in short comedies for eight years when he made this movie, Stan Laurel had done little to make it apparent he was one of the great talents of film comedy. Some of his movies of this period are watchable only by the most dedicated of completist. Yet, in this movie, we see he had finally found his own secret to making a funny film comedy: slowing it down. Not for him the frenetic pace of the Keystone imitators, but a slower speed that let him elaborate his gags and let the audience in on the joke: we start laughing as the awful inevitability of the gag becomes apparent and still are surprised at the inventive variations on a theme.

This pace is apparent in the very first shot: we see Stan, as a deerstalker-wearing detective, stewing over something at his desk. Eventually, it becomes clear that it is a blacksmith puzzle. A small boy comes in, does the puzzle, reassembles it and hands it back to Stan, who is still confounded by it. No pratfall, no sped-up motion, but a gag that fits the story, the character and Mr. Laurel.

The pace continues, speeding up gradually as he is hired by future Roach Studios regular, Anita Garvin, to spy on her husband. I shan't list the gags, but they are good and this movie is an excellent harbinger of things to come.