Laurel and Hardy Getting Used To Sound

Laurel and Hardy Get Some On-Set Coaching For Their Spanish Language Night Owls

Stan/Babe Reach Beyond Borders with Night Owls (1930)

A 60's fan wrote retired-to-the-Oceana Stan and reported purchase of "silent" Night Owls from Blackhawk Films. Laurel's reply counseled that it was a sound comedy, and should be seen that way. Maybe he was remembering the celebration of noise this early talker was. The team knew early on that laughs were sweetened by judicious use of sound over dialogue. Hold the talk, but clang the anvil. Night Owls has burglars Stan/Babe trying at very quiet entry to target house, failure a comedic consequence of tipped garbage pails, yowling cats, and fallen vases on ways in. Set outdoors, Night Owls was actually done on Roach stages, so each noise reverberates off walls, and that makes for nice confined effect. How many yoks could you get from Babe's coat/trousers being ripped? Plenty, as evidenced here. The best Laurel/Hardy comedies were the simplest; this pair needed plot contrivance least of any clowns. Night Owls was basic enough to last career life for the team to still do the break-in routine in 50's-Brit music halls. Night Owls was also first to add foreign-language versions, spoken phonetically by Laurel and Hardy plus revolving support players versed in respective languages, in this case Spanish and Italian. Here was a doable task for L&H, as they needed not words to convey humor,  this surprisingly in a '30 marketplace newly drunk on dialogue, once-greats of the silent era Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton having woke with hangovers after initial try at talk.