Laurel & Hardy's Co-Stars

Features:

Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward: Boston Herald review

MARY GORDON

Her face gave her occasional roles in silent movies, but her voice gave her a career.

Mary Gordon's distinctive brogue made her one of the screen's most popular character players. Any Hollywood film with an auld-sod setting may well include Mary Gordon among the cast. She appears in four Laurel & Hardy features: Pack Up Your Troubles (as Mrs. MacTavish, the babysitter), Bonnie Scotland (as Mrs. Bickerdike, the landlady -- her biggest role in a Laurel & Hardy movie), Way Out West (in the saloon scene, as most of the kitchen staff), and Saps at Sea (as Mrs. O'Riley, Ollie's neighbor).

She was born Mary Gilmour in Glasgow, Scotland on May 16, 1882. She came to the United States with a touring stage troupe, and like many actors of the period, worked in silent pictures. Her screen career began while the actress was in her forties, too old for ingenue roles but just right for character parts. When the talkies arrived, her natural accent and down-to-earth manner served her well, and she often played sympathetic or hearty mothers of British, Irish, or Scottish extraction. Many Hollywood juveniles played sensitive dramatic scenes opposite Mary Gordon as "Ma." She appeared in early talkies, the Charlie Chan mystery The Black Camel and Laurel & Hardy's Pack Up Your Troubles, to name a couple. The actress herself listed the Scottish-themed The Little Minister as her first major credit; she must have felt right at home in Bonnie Scotland, because some of it was filmed on the Little Minister sets!

As the actress reached middle age, her facial features became more distinct and recognizable (compare Saps at Sea with Pack Up Your Troubles, made nine years before), and she was cast more and more often in films. One of her biggest (and funniest) roles was in the James Stewart-Paulette Goddard musical comedy Pot o' Gold (1941), as a sharp-tongued boarding-house proprietor who has no use at all for her noisy neighbor! She had a recurring role in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce "Sherlock Holmes" series as "Mrs. Hudson," the detective's housekeeper; she reprised the role on the "Sherlock Holmes" radio series. She also appeared regularly in Monogram’s East Side Kids/Bowery Boys family of comedy-dramas, usually as Leo Gorcey's mother.

After World War II, when studios made fewer movies, Mary Gordon (along with many other established character actors) found work at the independent studios. Most of her postwar assignments were at Monogram, with excursions to Screen Guild, Eagle-Lion, and Republic. With the movie industry shifting to the faster pace of television production, the 68-year-old actress got off the Hollywood merry-go-round and retired in 1950 to a California suburb. She passed away on August 23, 1963, at the age of 81.

Mary Gordon was an unforgettable character player, one of the movies' best.

PATSY MORAN

Patsy Moran was a "part-time" movie actress: she didn't make a career of it, appearing in about two dozen pictures over a dozen years. Like her namesakes, Patsy Kelly and Polly Moran, Patsy Moran played an outspoken, streetwise plain-Jane whose wry observations brightened the screen.

She was born on October 13, 1903 in Pennsylvania. Her earliest film credit is a small role in the very obscure Topa Topa, an animal-adventure epic of 1938, produced by the equally obscure Pennant Pictures. (The leading man in that picture was James Bush, who later played hoodlums in three Laurel & Hardy movies.) That same year Patsy appeared in Laurel & Hardy's Block-Heads, in which she plays "Lulu," Ollie's old flame. She has a small but memorable role, with a few tart remarks about Mr. Laurel. She also appears in the team's Saps at Sea, as a switchboard operator who can't quite figure out Stan's phone conversations.

Patsy Moran joined Laurel & Hardy later than the team's familiar co-stars. Yet her work with Laurel & Hardy is so assured that one would think they had been performing together for years. When Stan and Babe assembled a pilot for a radio series, they remembered Patsy and cast her in the audition sketch, as the future Mrs. Laurel. "The Marriage of Stan Laurel" was recorded in 1941 and again in 1943. Justice of the peace Edgar Kennedy asks for the bride's name. "Moran," replies Ollie helpfully. "M-O-R-O-N."

Patsy's other film work centered in the Monogram and Columbia studios. At Monogram she played comic roles in "B" westerns, and she was a semi-regular in the popular "East Side Kids" comedies. She appeared twice as Leo Gorcey's mother, twice as Huntz Hall's mother, and most memorably in Mr. Muggs Steps Out as a society maid who knows more slang than the East Siders.

In 1946 the “East Side Kids” producer, Sam Katzman, moved to Columbia Pictures. For his first feature there, he hired Patsy Moran. While at Columbia she worked with Columbia's two-reel comedy unit, and played her usual wisecracking character opposite Joe DeRita and Billie Burke (definitely, two comedians with opposing styles!). She was especially valuable in the Burke shorts, bearing the brunt of the physical comedy and sparing the leading lady from the usual Columbia roughhouse.

Few new short-subject series were launched in the 1950s, but RKO Radio Pictures, after the passing of its senior two-reel star Edgar Kennedy, introduced a new line of situation comedies. Veteran character comics Wally Brown and Jack Kirkwood were teamed, with Patsy Moran playing their impatient landlady. These were her last short subjects; she made her last feature in 1953.

Patsy worked in television in the early 1950s (including a 1954 "I Love Lucy" episode with Lucille Ball), then retired. She remained a resident of Hollywood, where she passed away on December 10, 1968 at age 65.

Patsy Moran is a rare example of a comic appearing with Laurel & Hardy in more than one medium. Watching Patsy (or listening to her) with Laurel & Hardy is fun for fans.

SIDNEY TOLER

Some of Laurel & Hardy's co-stars were often associated with a single type of character part: Jack Norton usually played drunks, Eric Blore servants, Charles Middleton villains, and so on. Character actor Sidney Toler made dozens of films over 17 years, but he is generally identified with his most famous role: "Charlie Chan." When Warner Oland, who personified the wily Oriental detective in films, died in 1938, 20th Century-Fox scoured the casting directories for a suitable replacement. Amid much publicity the studio settled on a relatively obscure background player named Sidney Toler, and the "Charlie Chan" mysteries made him a star.

Sidney Toler was born in Warrensburg, Missouri on April 28, 1874. A graduate of the University of Kansas, he played prominent roles in popular plays of the day, including "Lulu Belle" and "Canary Dutch." He also wrote one play, "Belle of Richmond."

He entered films at the dawn of sound, in 1929's Madame X. Toler's stock-in-trade was resigned grumpiness, which he often used for comic effect. In Speak Easily (1932), stage manager Toler's reactions to the Buster Keaton-Jimmy Durante antics around him are very funny. (Not all of Toler's roles were this prominent; he's a crowd extra in The Marx Brothers' 1933 film Duck Soup.)

Laurel & Hardy's Our Relations gave Toler the reasonably good role of the grouchy captain of the boys' ship ("And don't call me Cappy!"). Toler was a dependable character player but he didn't make a great impression on audiences until he became "Charlie Chan."

Sol Wurtzel, who later produced most of Laurel & Hardy's wartime films, had been making the Chan mysteries steadily until star Warner Oland passed away and "Number One Son" Keye Luke bowed out. Wurtzel wanted to keep the series going, but he was typically cautious about Sidney Toler; he tried the actor for a single picture before committing to a series. Toler caught on immediately, and he continued in the role almost exclusively for the rest of his career. When Fox discontinued the series in 1942, Toler bought the screen rights to the "Chan" character and sold Monogram Pictures on a new series. Toler's "Chan" was less placid and more acid than his predecessor, and his annoyed remarks to Numbers Two, Three, or Four Sons, and to "Birmingham, the chauffeur" show Toler as his delightfully grumpy best. He also took part in the comic moments of the Chans, notably the finale of Dark Alibi, in which Mantan Moreland and Ben Carter do their "incomplete sentence" act and Toler joins in! Toler's last non-Chan role was in the Fred Allen-Jack Benny comedy It's in the Bag (1945), and even this had Toler good-naturedly kidding his meal ticket: he's a sour plainclothes detective who occasionally speaks without prepositions, like "Mr. Chan" himself!

At a time in life when many actors would be enjoying a quiet retirement, Sidney Toler was in his seventies, making three Charlie Chan features a year for Monogram. In 1946, diagnosed with cancer, Toler filmed two Chan features in increasing pain. To minimize the demands on Toler, Monogram hired Victor Sen Young, his Number Two Son from Fox. Young and Mantan Moreland carry much of the action in Toler’s last few films. Like Warner Oland, Sidney Toler died in professional harness; now gravely ill, Toler was positively heroic in his determination to complete one more film, The Trap, before the illness took his life at the age of 73.

When today's audiences see Sidney Toler in Our Relations, they usually recognize "Charlie Chan." His scenes with Laurel & Hardy made for some amusing comedy. If only 20th Century-Fox had used Sidney Toler in a Laurel & Hardy movie — or Laurel & Hardy in a Sidney Toler movie!

Adding new focus to old work:
Boston-area film buff examines '40s projects of
Laurel and Hardy

Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward

Boston-area film buff Scott MacGillivray has accomplished something that most historians can only dream of doing: overturning the conventional wisdom. In Laurel and Hardy: From the Forties Forward (Vestal Press), he rewrites the book on the movie-comedy team by actually examining the films everyone else had dismissed.

For years, writers have focused on Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy's greatest successes, from their teaming at the end of the silent era in the late 1920s through their best films of the 1930s, such as Way Out West. Their initial biographer, John McCabe, wrote the first book about the team before Laurel's death in 1965.

"When McCabe asked Laurel about the '40s period, Laurel just gave it short shrift," MacGillivray, 41, said. "Everyone who's done a book on Laurel and Hardy went with McCabe."

Not MacGillivray. For more than 20 years he's been the head of the local chapter of the "Sons of the Desert," the international Laurel and Hardy appreciation society. In that capacity he's done a movie program every month, where he has made a point of showing every Laurel and Hardy film that exists, including those made after 1940, when the team no longer had creative control over their movies.

"The whole marketplace had changed. Everyone was trying to clone Abbott and Costello," MacGillivray said. Twentieth Century-Fox and M-G-M, where Laurel and Hardy did their '40s films, considered them old-fashioned slapstick comics and stuck Stan and Ollie in a series of B movies.

"Most authors just dismiss them without further ado. There's more to the story."

Indeed, MacGillivray reported that Hardy considered the 1943 Jitterbugs to be one of his all-time best performances. He also found that the final Fox films, especially 1945's The Bullfighters, were so lightly supervised by the studio that Laurel was actually able to regain some of the control he had lost, directing some of the comic sequences himself.

More tantalizing are some of the projects that never happened. One surprising film that was developed and then put aside would have cast them opposite Martha Raye in a film version of Rodgers and Hart's "By Jupiter."

MacGillivray admits Laurel and Hardy's best work is earlier in their careers. He just wants to reclaim the rest of their legacy for their fans. "People are saying, 'I'm going to have to look at these again,'" he said. "I love that."

You don't think of "leading men" in a Laurel & Hardy movie. With Stan and Ollie as the center of attention, the male leads consisted of either a traditional "juvenile" role or an incidental romantic presence.

Only rarely did we see an actor who shared equally in Laurel & Hardy's dialogue, plot situations, and comic routines. In the 1930s, it was Dennis King (The Devil's Brother). In the 1940s, it was Bob Bailey (Jitterbugs and The Dancing Masters).

Robert Bainter Bailey was born on June 13, 1913 in Toledo, Ohio. Like Stan Laurel, Bailey was born into a show-business family and grew up in a theatrical atmosphere. He became a regular member of the Chicago radio community, with recurring roles in such shows as "The Road of Life," "Scattergood Baines," and "That Brewster Boy."

Bob Bailey answered the call from Hollywood in 1943, and broke into films opposite Laurel & Hardy in Jitterbugs. This was a remake of a 1933 Fox film called Arizona to Broadway, and Bailey took the featured role of "Chester Wright," a worldly confidence man.

Bailey worked so well with Laurel & Hardy that he was hired for their next film, The Dancing Masters. His role of "Grant Lawrence," boy inventor, was neither as demanding nor as prominent as his work in Jitterbugs, but he tried his best with low comedy. In the aftermath of a ginger-ale-spraying sequence, Bailey's half-sheepish, half-snarling "I got my pants wet!" is a comic highlight.

Bob Bailey had superb dialogue skills but limited visual "business"; his few moments of facial mugging in The Dancing Masters are amusing but mechanical, as though he was uncomfortable in broad comedy. 20th Century-Fox took the hint and turned him into "Robert Bailey," promising young dramatic actor. Throughout 1944 Bailey had moderate to minor roles in five 20th Century-Fox features. He lacked the chiseled profile and rugged physique of the typical Hollywood leading man. His soft, boyish features were not the matinee-idol type. His talents, and especially his voice, were better suited to broadcasting, so Bailey returned to network radio.

In 1955 CBS Radio revived one of its popular detective series, "Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar," and cast Bob Bailey in the lead. The role had been played in the hard-boiled gumshoe tradition by Hollywood actors Edmond O'Brien and John Lund, but Bailey brought new dimension and sensitivity to the tough-guy role. The Bob Bailey "Johnny Dollars" are among the most popular and collectible recordings of vintage radio.

In late 1960, CBS moved production of "Johnny Dollar" to New York. Bailey, unwilling to relocate, was forced to relinquish the job. He kept busy writing TV scripts -- the children's adventure show "Fury" was an ongoing project -- but his heart was in acting. Plans to bring "Johnny Dollar" to television were dropped when producers couldn't reconcile Bailey's colorful voice with his unimposing (5-foot-9, 150-pound) physique. Bailey made one more film appearance: he plays a reporter in the 1962 Burt Lancaster drama Birdman of Alcatraz.

After this film, Bailey suddenly withdrew from show business and settled into a solitary private life, apart from family and friends for many years. In the 1970s, reunited with his daughter Roberta Goodwin, he lived comfortably in a California suburb. Bob Bailey suffered a stroke in 1983 and passed away that year. He was 70 years old.

Bob Bailey was a skilled dramatic actor who made two funny movies almost by accident. We salute his contributions to the world of Laurel & Hardy.