I’m now watching the incredible new DVD Laurel & Hardy: The Essential Collection, which has digitally restored DVDs of ALL of the team’s Hal Roach black and white comedies, including ones shot in foreign languages before dubbing was used.
Over the years I’ve read — and the commentaries on the DVDs also indicate — that many Laurel & Hardy and comedy critics consider “Hot Wild” one of the funniest if not the funniest Laurel and Hardy sound film.
Here’s a colorized version on You Tube of the short (which appears in the new DVD collection in restored black and white), in two embeds. Note:
*It’s fast pace.
*How Oliver Hardy looks at the audience.
*How the actress playing his wife also looks at the audience.
*The effectiveness of sight gags, far better staged than The Three Stooges.
*The background music. In this case, before real scoring was put in place, they’d run a record two times. This music on this short is among the most popular.
*The house used was a facade house constructed for the short.
*YES they really did dodge cars and buses when they filmed it and except for the end with Hardy on a ladder falling, they often did their own stunts.
If you like fast paced comedy, this is FOR YOU — and if you’re a younger TMV visitor, this will be a revelation. It’s FUN:
Second part:
This is THE DEFINITIVE collection of the Laurel and Hardy shorts and features produced by Hal Roach. Incredible quality (to be reviewed at a later date):
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.