Laurel and Hardy's wonderful short subject plots could be based around any single idea no matter
how outlandish, from the sophisticated body-swap of playing each other’s wives
in Twice Two and devilish baby
versions of themselves in Brats, to a
‘simple’ premise like leaving home in time for a wedding or just leaving home,
period, in Perfect Day. Along the
way, they cleverly gave the laughs an extra frisson by battling such darker forces
as vengeful villain Walter Long and scorned harpie Mae Busch
The first
Laurel and Hardy short to inspire ghoulish guffaws was Habeas Corpus (1928) which has the unique distinction of two Oscar-winning
directors behind it. As well as Leo
McCarey, who insisted he mostly wrote for them and here is credited as ‘Supervising
Director’, James Parrott went on to helm many of their classics like The Music Box in 1932 (and also their
next horror-comedy after this, The
Laurel-Hardy Murder Case).
Strictly speaking Habeas Corpus is a silent film, but for fans accustomed to their later ones it feels very much like a sound film with the sound-track removed and replaced with an orchestra plus added whistles, wood-blocks and other effects. The inciting protagonist is the balding mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle) who follows in a long line of horror movie medical whackos with his experiment to prove ‘That the human brain has a level surface – in some cases practically flat’. The irreverent H.M. Walker is the wit behind the titles though such is the strength of the sight-gags to come that he’s barely needed.
The Professor
needs the help of enterprising idiots who can provide him with a body from a
little nocturnal grave-robbing. As if by tragic, without seeing them we get a
lovely visual clue as to who the prospective Burke and Hare will be: a close-up
of a prissy hand dismissing that of another person to take over knocking on the
door. It is Stan and Ollie, ever ready to bypass common sense in favour of
ready money, in this case $500 for the job. Little do they know, even less than
usual, that the butler is an undercover policeman by the name of Ledoux – very likely
an in-joke reference to Inspector Ledoux in Lon Chaney’s The Phantom of the Opera that we covered earlier. Charley Rogers in
the role would work with Laurel and Hardy many more times over the years.
The police
seize the nutty professor while the boys head to work. Along the way, Stan
shows rare powers of perception in suggesting their employer might be ‘a trifle
cuckoo’ – emphasised by a cuckoo FX cue. Ollie reminds us that the pair’s
partnership extends to sharing the one brain by assuring him: ‘He is as sound
mentally as you or I’.
The boys
head for the graveyard where As usual even getting into the graveyard isn’t simple for those
simple in mind. After wet paint shenannigans, they spend over three minutes in increasingly haphazard and
funny bids just to get Stan hoisted over the wall by Ollie. Once in though, it may
not be gruesome for the twosome yet their night-shift becomes hair-raising
courtesy of a seemingly ghostly wandering lamp (placed on a nearby tortoise by
Stan), a rubber bat that may be related to the unconvincing flapper seen in
Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula and the
close surveillance by Ledoux that turns him into a running smokey spectre to
terrorise our heroes.
The pace is
excellent and the high gag-rate sustains throughout. Look out for Ollie’s
demonstration of how to properly use your friend to scale a wall – or in his
case utterly demolish it – one of their sublime moments of destruction that
always deserves a rewind. There’s even a nice possible nod to Buster Keaton in
the way that Ledoux, bagged by mistake, pokes his legs through Stan’s hefted
sack and walks behind him in perfect sync.
Habeas
Corpus is a great example of a comedy team adding a touch of spookiness to
a short, exploiting a single idea, playing on its main characters’ relationship
and sustaining the chaos to the end.
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