Laurel & Hardy: From the Forties Forward: Boston Herald review
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.
Copyright © 2008 by
Scott MacGillivray.
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.
Copyright © 2008 by Scott MacGillivray.
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!
Copyright © 2008 by Scott MacGillivray.
Adding new focus
to old work:
Boston-area film
buff examines '40s projects of
Laurel and Hardy
by Daniel M. Kimmel
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
"When McCabe asked
Not MacGillivray. For more than 20 years
he's been the head of the local chapter of the
"Sons of the Desert," the international
"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."
Click here for information about ordering this book.
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
Bob Bailey answered the call from
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
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
In late 1960, CBS moved production of
"Johnny Dollar" to
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
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.
Copyright (c) 1998 by Scott MacGillivray. Acknowledgment is made to John Gassman and Roberta Goodwin for background information.
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