From: David P. Hayes
Newsgroups: alt.movies.chaplin,alt.comedy.laurel-hardy
Date: Monday, February 23, 1998 12:27 AM
MRS QT wrote in message
<19980223002900.TAA01614@ladder03.news.aol.com>…
>I think the last part of
>the movie - where they show… the little added
>info by the actors pictures had more interesting stuff than in the rest of the
>film - probably becz it was all fact.
There was what I regarded as a curious omission among the "what they went on to" biographical sketches shown alongside the insert close-ups of the actors: during the Karno period of the movie, when Chaplin/Downey sees a comedy movie and has become so enamored of the medium that he fails to return to his room when his roommate expects him, we briefly see Chaplin/Downey's soft-spoken, tall, thin, light-haired, plain-faced roommate. I only saw the film once, but I seem to recall that in a fleeting moment, he is referred to as "Stan." Thus at the end of the movie, I half-expected to see a title telling us that "Stan Jefferson, after Chaplin left the Karno Company, struggled in vaudeville and unremarkable short companies made for small companies. In 1926, after he has resigned himself to working behind the camera instead of before it, he teamed with comedian Oliver Hardy and as Stan Laurel became half of the best-loved comedy duo in movie history." I've wondered whether the license-holder of Laurel & Hardy merchandising, Larry Harmon, forbade an explicit depiction of Jefferson/Laurel without exorbitant clearance fees.
Another grievance with the biographical sketches: we're told that Mabel Normand never worked again in pictures after her implication in the William Desmond Taylor death, yet Normand thereafter starred in a series of shorts (and one five-reeler) for Hal Roach.
--
David Hayes
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