The following is my entry in The Laurel & Hardy Blogathon, being hosted at this blog from March 1-3, 2019. Click on the image above, and read bloggers’ takes on some of the wonderful film comedies from these two terrific comics!
Like nearly everything Laurel & Hardy did on film, their 1954 live appearance on Ralph Edwards’ NBC celebrity-bio series “This Is Your Life” is worth seeing at least once — but in this case, probably not much more than once. Even their final Hollywood films offered L&H more to do than sit like stooges in somebody else’s scheme, which is pretty much what “This Is Your Life” did.
For those unfamiliar with this sentimental hooey, “This Is Your Life’s” premise was that each week, some unsuspecting celebrity would be dragged onto live TV and have his or her life story condescendingly recalled to him by host Ralph Edwards, who would also parade the celebrity’s friends or associates on stage to briefly regale the audience with all-too-well rehearsed anecdotes. (Buster Keaton was another comedy legend subjected to this process at one point.) The “TIYL” format is shown in full, naked flower here, as director Leo McCarey stammeringly tried to tell how L&H were made a team, and one-time co-star Vivian Blaine told a story that had nothing to do with her co-starring role in L&H’s Jitterbugs.
Stan Laurel later recounted his disgust with the whole enterprise, and it shows on camera — while always smiling and polite, he never utters one word more than he has to. By contrast, the show reunited Oliver Hardy with his childhood sweetheart, and Hardy is shown trying to have a private conversation with his old acquaintance, oblivious of Edwards’ rush to continue the show (which was running late due to Stan’s reluctance to show up at all, causing Edwards to ad-lib uncomfortably for the first few minutes of the broadcast).
The L&H segment of “This Is Your Life” stands, like their final big-studio films, as another prime example of Hollywood’s willingness to capitalize on The Boys’ famous personas without any concern as to whether L&H were shown in their best light.
If you dare to watch the segment, it’s embedded below:
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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