When you think of the wives in a Laurel & Hardy movie, the image that probably springs to mind is a repressed shrew wielding a state-of-the-art shotgun. When it comes to the great unanswered questions about L&H films, the motive for unrelievedly hostile spouses in nearly every film where Stan and/or Ollie are married is as puzzling as "Why did Stan Laurel prefer all those freak endings?"
The most likely reason will be poo-poo'd by L&H buffs who abhor in-depth analysis of the team's themes, so let's get that one out of the way first. As the uncredited writer-director-editor of the Laurel & Hardy comedies, Stan Laurel might well have let some unexpressed feelings about the opposite sex seep into his movies. It is well-documented that his legally binding relationships consisted of: a common-law wife who continually fought with and intimidated him; the woman who bore him his only child; a Russian woman who tried to make her fame via the Laurel name; a woman he married and divorced twice; and his final wife, who made his final decades quite happy after Hollywood turned its back on Laurel and Hardy. Given this checkered history, it's hard not to conclude that at least some of the female imagery in L&H movies, like the bitter spouses in W.C. Fields's movies, might be Laurel's (subconscious, at least?) payback for the pain that the opposite sex caused him.
A simpler reason might be that, as a craftsman of gags, Laurel and his fellow funnymen thought that nasty wives or girlfriends could serve as a rich source of comedy. Laurel was hardly alone in this presumption; witness the hateful women in the comedies of Fields and The Three Stooges, among others. I have a couple of problems with this theory, though:
(1) Dismissing anti-male women as a comedy standard lets the makers off the hook too easily. In Laurel & Hardy's day, it was also customary to get easy laughs from caricatures of black people, too--a convention that makes some otherwise delightful Buster Keaton comedies intermittently painful to watch. (Check out the protracted blacks-getting-spooked-by-ghosts routine in Keaton's Neighbors, or the scene in Seven Chances where Keaton pursues a would-be bride on foot, then quickly turns tail when he sees the color of her skin.) Groucho Marx dismissed the argument out of hand by saying that women just plain didn't like "'cockeyed' comedy," and as Gerald Mast states in his comprehensive book The Comic Mind, great comedy always treats certain kinds of people quite nastily. Nevertheless, any entertainment that, by its nature, negates half of the population might be called into question--especially when the hostility portrayed by its characters seems mostly unearned.
(2) Saying that Laurel & Hardy could be funny only with nasty wives is an easy out. L&H could have benign wives and still be quite hilarious. One example is the opening scene of their short Come Clean, where Ollie is quite happy to stay at home with his wife; when Stan and his wife knock at their door, Ollie and the Mrs. contrive to convince the Laurels that they're not at home (though as soon as the ruse is up, the wives devolve back into the standard shrewish L&H spouses). There is even an entire L&H feature film, Our Relations, that has surprisingly agreeable wives. Stan even calls his wife "Bubbles" as a pet nickname, and in her perennial role as Mrs. Hardy, Daphne Pollard actually behaves as though she enjoys her husband's company. The movie's mistaken-identity plot eventually calls for the wives to be upset, but for once their anger emanates from a plausible misunderstanding, not from the all-encompassing belief that men are numbskulls.
If one were to plot this sort of thing on an ascending scale, Our Relations would probably be at the "benign" end; the mid-level might be represented by The Flying Deuces, in which Ollie expresses his eternal love for a woman who is not only unappreciative, she strings Ollie along (and laughs behind his back at her declarations of love) while she already has a beau. At the far end of the spectrum is the typical gunning female--best represented (if "best" is the correct term for this kind of thing) by the venomous spouses in Laurel & Hardy's most popular feature, Sons of the Desert (1934).
Given the unrelieved hostility of the wives in this movie, and Stan and Ollie's actions which take their cues from such nastiness, it's hard not to read this entire movie as reverse misogyny. The movie's premise is that the boys' lodge (which supplies the movie's title) is having its annual convention in Chicago, and all members are required to attend. Stan immediately starts to puddle up when he considers how his wife will react to this news, but Ollie only spouts the kind of "king of the castle" malarkey that Ralph Kramden would spew so continuously decades later on "The Honeymooners": "I go places and do things," declares Ollie, "and then I tell my wife!" The remainder of the movie takes great pains to show that, if Ollie does indeed go places and do things, telling his wife about them is the last thing he wants to do.
Mrs. Hardy (Mae Busch) barely tolerates Stan's presence in their apartment, a sign of worse things to come. When Ollie tries to tell his wife that he will be attending the Chicago convention, he endures a lot of crockery on his head courtesy of Mrs. Hardy. After Stan witnesses this outburst, it's his turn to play bantam rooster, telling Ollie (in a quite out-of-character speech) what a fool he is to endure such behavior. He is about to tell Ollie what he'd say to put Mrs. Laurel in her place, when lo and behold, Mrs. Laurel (Dorothy Christie) appears--shotgun in hand, having just come back from a day of hunting(!). Stan melts under his wife's glare, tucks his tail between his legs, and heads on home (to the apartment next door).
In what appears to be a creation of one of situation comedy's more enduring cliches, the boys then contrive to have a fake doctor (actually it's a real doctor, albeit a vet) examine Ollie and tell Mrs. Hardy that Ollie needs a cruise to Honolulu to calm his nerves--and of course, Stan needs to go with him. The ruse actually works. Unfortunately, the wives then hear news that the cruise ship which Stan and Ollie were supposed to have boarded has sunk. Strangely enough, this scene allows the wives their only moment of affection, as they anxiously await news of the ship's survivors. To take their minds off their worries, they go to see a movie, which is prefaced by a newsreel showing none other than Stan and Ollie clowning at the Chicago convention. The wives' grief quickly turns into what, in male terms, would be deemed a p***ing contest, as Mrs. L. and Mrs. H. determine whose husband is the bigger liar.
Through contrivances as yawn-inspiring as anything in L&H's later Fox movies, the boys end up in their pajamas, in the rain, accompanied by a policeman. The wives sit the boys down and ask them for their account of what really happened. They manage to contrive a tale only a couple of child-minded adults could concoct (they made it home before the rescue ship arrived, by ship-hiking), until Mrs. Laurel corners Stan once and for all. Stan tearfully acknowledges the truth and goes next door with his shotgun-wielding wife to face what looks like his final fate.
Mrs. Laurel won't be shooting any game tonight, though--she's happy that she got the best of Mrs. Hardy, and she rewards Stan with chocolates and cigarettes. Stan hears a commotion next door and goes to investigate, finding Ollie crouching from another round of crockery.
For all of the wonderful comedy that Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy brought to cinema, and at the risk of sounding like a member of the PC police, I think the anti-female stance of Laurel & Hardy's movies should at least be re-examined, if not downright deplored.
(C) 2006, Steven Bailey.
