Mark Mason

Love match

Steve Coogan and John C. Reilly are note-perfect as Laurel and Hardy

You mess with Laurel and Hardy at your peril. Their fan base is essentially the entire world. Samuel Beckett adored them: many think they inspired Waiting For Godot. Eric Morecambe’s reluctance to appear in bed with Ernie Wise melted when he was reminded that Stan and Ollie had used the same conceit. In Poland the duo are known as Flip i Flap, in Germany as Dick und Doof. I once attended a New Year’s Eve party at which the two dozen children present (toddlers to teenagers) were parked in front of a screen with a stack of Laurel and Hardy DVDs — not one of them left the room all evening. You have to ask yourself: could you honestly be friends with someone who didn’t love Laurel and Hardy?

Which means that Stan & Ollie has got us nervous. Film-makers like newness, they like to shock, to show us something we didn’t see coming. Screenwriter Jeff Pope and director Jon S. Baird couldn’t be about to tell us that Laurel and Hardy hated each other, could they? That behind the famous on-screen chemistry there was an Abbott and Costello-style loathing? This would be an illusion-crusher of Yewtree proportions. We get even more nervous as the film progresses, and there are flashbacks from its main story — the duo’s 1953 tour of Britain — to 1939, when Hardy made a film without Laurel (but with an elephant). This still rankles, and at one point produces a row.

But relax. The row blows over, allowing the film to become something much more interesting: a love story. Beautiful writing and superb acting show us why Stan (Steve Coogan) and Ollie (John C. Reilly) loved each other. Indeed that’s the reason for the title — it’s forenames rather than surnames because the makers wanted to reveal the people behind Laurel and Hardy.

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