Pardon Us is
Laurel and HardyLaurel and Hardy were a popular comedy team composed of thin, English-born Stan Laurel and heavy, American-born Oliver Hardy . They became famous during the early half of the 20th century for their work in motion pictures and also appeared on stage throughout America and Europe.The two comedians...
's first feature length
comedy filmComedy film is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humour. Also, films in this style typically have a happy ending . One of the oldest genres in film, some of the very first silent movies were comedies...
. It was produced by
Hal RoachHarold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. was an American film and television producer and director from the 1910s to the 1990s.- Early life and career :Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York...
and
Stan LaurelStan Laurel was an English comic actor, writer and director, famous as the first half of the comedy double-act Laurel and Hardy, whose career stretched from the silent films of the early 20th century until post-World War II.-Early life:Stan Laurel was born in his grandparents' house on 16 June...
, directed by
James ParrottJames Parrott , was an American actor and film director; and the younger brother of film comedian Charley Chase.-Early years:...
, and originally distributed by MGM in
1931-Academy Awards:*Best Picture: Cimarron - MGM*Best Actor: Lionel Barrymore - A Free Soul*Best Actor: Wallace Beery - The Champ*Best Actor: Fredric March - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*Best Actress: Marie Dressler - Min and Bill...
.
Plot
It is
prohibitionProhibition of alcohol, often referred to simply as prohibition, is a sumptuary law which prohibits alcohol. Typically, the manufacture, transportation, import, export, and sale of alcoholic beverages is restricted or illegal. The term can also apply to the periods in the histories of the countries...
, and beer barons Laurel and Hardy are sent to prison for concocting their own home brew. They are put in a cell with "Tiger" Long, the roughest, toughest and meanest of all inmates. Stan has a loose tooth that causes him to emit a razzberry at the end of every sentence; the inmate interprets this as a coolly defiant attitude and is impressed — nobody else ever stood up to him like that. He and Stan and Ollie become fast friends.
After a prison break, the boys escape to a cotton plantation, where they hide out undetected, in
blackfaceBlackface, in the narrow sense, is a style of theatrical makeup that originated in the United States, used to take on the appearance of certain archetypes of American racism, especially those of the "happy-go-lucky darky on the plantation" or the "dandified coon "...
. When they attempt to repair the warden's car, they are discovered and are sent back to prison. They inadvertently break up a prison riot and the grateful warden issues them a pardon.
Opening title card
H.M. Walker wrote the opening title card to this film, which states, "Mr. Hardy is a man of wonderful ideas — So is Mr. Laurel — As long as he doesn't try to think."
Production
After the release of MGM's hit
The Big HouseBig House may refer to:*Prison, in American slang*Big House , a country music band from the late 1990s**Big House , the band's self-titled debut album*"Big House" , a 1993 song by Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline-Places:...
with
Chester MorrisJohn Chester Brooks Morris was an American actor, perhaps most famous for his role in the Boston Blackie detective series of the 1940s...
and
Wallace BeeryWallace Beery was an American actor, known for his portrayal of Bill in Min and Bill opposite Marie Dressler, his titular role in a series of films featuring the character Sweedie, and his titular role in The Champ, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor...
, producer
Hal RoachHarold Eugene "Hal" Roach, Sr. was an American film and television producer and director from the 1910s to the 1990s.- Early life and career :Hal Roach was born in Elmira, New York...
decided to feature his top comedy team in a two-reeler spoofing the current prison drama. Roach also felt that since his product was currently being released through MGM, there would be no problem borrowing the sets to
The Big House from them to keep costs down. Studio head
Louis B. MayerLouis Burt Mayer was a Russian-born American film producer. He is generally cited as the creator of the "star system" within Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in its golden years. Known always as Louis B...
agreed to the proposition on the proviso that
Laurel and HardyLaurel and Hardy were a popular comedy team composed of thin, English-born Stan Laurel and heavy, American-born Oliver Hardy . They became famous during the early half of the 20th century for their work in motion pictures and also appeared on stage throughout America and Europe.The two comedians...
would make a film for his studio in the near future. Infuriated, Roach turned down the offer, hiring set designer Frank Durloff to build an exact replica of the prison sets used in
The Big House.
The film began production as
The Rap in June 1930. To Roach's dismay, shooting went way over schedule with enough footage already in the can to make two prison pictures. As a result the producer decided to release
The Rap as Laurel and Hardy's first starring feature.
Previewed in August 1930, the film ran 70 minutes, and was subject to lukewarm reviews in which critics stated that the movie needed a bit of tightening. Stan Laurel decided to withdraw the film from general distribution and work on the picture by adding new scenes and deleting unnecessary ones. A musical score was then added, and eventually, after much trial and error,
Pardon Us (its release title) was premiered on August 15, 1931, a year after its first preview.
As a
comedyComedy as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse generally intended to amuse, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in Ancient Greece...
feature-length offering, running a little under an hour, it is not considered one of
Laurel and HardyLaurel and Hardy were a popular comedy team composed of thin, English-born Stan Laurel and heavy, American-born Oliver Hardy . They became famous during the early half of the 20th century for their work in motion pictures and also appeared on stage throughout America and Europe.The two comedians...
's best. Its structure has been criticized as that of a string of short subjects thrown together to make one episodic feature. The pacing is deliberate, allowing some time out for Oliver Hardy to sing a rendition of "Lazy Moon" while Stan accompanies him with an eccentric soft shoe dance.
The cast includes a number of
silent filmA silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially spoken dialogue. The idea of combining motion pictures with recorded sound is nearly as old as film itself, but because of the technical challenges involved, synchronized dialogue was only made practical in the late 1920s with...
veterans, including
Walter LongWalter Long was an American character actor in films from the 1910s. He was born in Nashua, New Hampshire.-Involvement with D.W. Griffith:He appeared in many D.W...
. As a foil to the child-like antics of L&H, his snarling portrayal of "The Tiger" is decidedly tongue in cheek. Long would be put to similar use in some later L&H ventures such as
Any Old Port!Any Old Port! is a 1932 short film starring Laurel and Hardy, directed by James W.Horne and produced by Hal Roach.- Plot :Sailors Laurel and Hardy disembark and book in a sleazy hotel. The owner Mugsie Long intends to marry a young girl against her wishes, but Stan and Ollie come to her rescue...
,
Going Bye-Bye!- Plot :In a packed courtroom, Butch Long vows revenge on 'squealers' Laurel and Hardy whose evidence has helped to send him to prison for the rest of his life...
, and
The Live GhostThe Live Ghost is a 1934 short film starring Laurel and Hardy, directed by Charles Rogers and produced by Hal Roach.-Plot:A tough sea captain persuades fish market workers Laurel and Hardy to shanghai a crew for him at the local bar, at a dollar a head. There is initial success, but Stan and Ollie...
.
The warden, played by D.W. Griffith regular
Wilfred LucasWilfred Lucas was a stage and film actor, a film director, and a screenwriter.-Career:A native of Ontario, Canada, Lucas headed to New York City to work in the theater, making his Broadway acting debut in 1904 at the Savoy Theater in the production of The Superstition of Sue...
, meets Stan and Ollie upon their arrival at the prison. "My, my... And still they come..." he intones with a saintly air, until he mistakes Stan's loose tooth razzberry for the real thing, thus changing his demeanor violently.
June MarloweJune Marlowe , was an American actress, who appeared in six Our Gang short subjects as the lovely schoolteacher, Miss Crabtree....
, who portrays the warden's daughter has only a very brief appearance despite her receiving billing immediately after the boys. Apparently most of her role ended up on the
cutting room floorThe term cutting room floor is used in the film industry as a figure of speech referring to unused footage not included in the finished film. In fact offcuts of film are retained in a special cutting room bin and numbered during the editing process in case they are required later...
. In the original script, she was to appear at the climax of the picture trapped inside the prison during the final jail-break attempt scene. An elaborate sequence was filmed but not used, in which the convicts set the prison on fire as part of their escape plan and the warden's daughter was seen screaming from her second floor bedroom surrounded by flames and menaced by the lecherous "Tiger". Laurel and Hardy were then to enter for a grand slapstick finale involving a fire hose and a ladder. This scene wasn't made available until a 2004
DVDDVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc,is an optical disc storage media format, and was founded in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage...
issue (see below).
Stan Laurel did not find this sequence satisfactory, and re-filmed the much simpler ending involving the boys holding the convicts at bay with a machine gun. In the released version, June Marlowe does not appear in this sequence at all. However, she does appear in the
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
version of
Pardon Us, which was entitled
De Bote en Bote ("From Cell to Cell"). This version still exists, allowing us to view the alternate ending to the film in which the boys in gray beards are reminiscing.
The plantation scenes with the boys in black face were key to the movie's plot. Although no Negro actor had a significant camera role, the Etude Ethiopian Chorus, directed by Freita Shaw and managed by her partner Mattie Duckett, can be heard singing "Swing Along", "Hand Me Down The Silver Trumpet Gabriel", and other numbers during the plantation scene.
It was released in the UK under an alternate title,
Jailbirds.
Cast
- Stan Laurel
Stan Laurel was an English comic actor, writer and director, famous as the first half of the comedy double-act Laurel and Hardy, whose career stretched from the silent films of the early 20th century until post-World War II.-Early life:Stan Laurel was born in his grandparents' house on 16 June...
as Stanley
- Oliver Hardy
Oliver Hardy was an American comic actor famous as one half of Laurel and Hardy, the classic double act that began in the era of silent films and lasted over 31 years, from 1926 to 1957...
as Oliver
- Walter Long
Walter Long was an American character actor in films from the 1910s. He was born in Nashua, New Hampshire.-Involvement with D.W. Griffith:He appeared in many D.W...
as The Tiger
- June Marlowe
June Marlowe , was an American actress, who appeared in six Our Gang short subjects as the lovely schoolteacher, Miss Crabtree....
as Warden's Daughter
- Jimmy Finlayson
James Henderson "Jimmy" Finlayson was a Scottish-American actor who worked in both silent and sound comedies...
as Schoolteacher
- Wilfred Lucas
Wilfred Lucas was a stage and film actor, a film director, and a screenwriter.-Career:A native of Ontario, Canada, Lucas headed to New York City to work in the theater, making his Broadway acting debut in 1904 at the Savoy Theater in the production of The Superstition of Sue...
as Warden
- Tiny Sandford
Stanley J. "Tiny" Sandford was a tall, burly actor who is best remembered for his roles in Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin films. He was usually cast as a comic heavy, and often played policemen, doormen, prizefighters, or bullies.Sandford was born in Osage, Iowa. After working in stock...
as Prison Guard
Foreign language versions
Besides the Spanish version
De Bote en Bote mentioned earlier, an
ItalianItalian is a Romance language spoken by about 60 million people in Italy, and by a total of around 70 million in the world. In Switzerland, Italian is one of four official languages. It is also the official language of San Marino, as well as the primary language of Vatican City...
version was filmed, entitled
Muraglie ("Walls"). A
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
version was also filmed, entitled
Hinter Schloss und Riegel ("Behind Lock and Bar"). The
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
version was entitled
Sous Les Verrous ("Under the Locks"). Unfortunately, the French and Italian versions no longer exist, but some extracts from the German version were discovered in 1999 and are available on DVD.
Each foreign language version was shot simultaneously with the English version, with the actors actually speaking the language. This was accomplished by employing actors who were fluent in their respective languages for smaller roles, with the major parts reserved for the American actors. These films were cunningly conceived, with language coaches reciting the lines and the mono-lingual performers writing their lines down phonetically on cue cards. These cue cards were just out of camera range, and it was not uncommon to see an actor glance off to the side for their next cue in the days before dubbing, but it proved to be too expensive and time consuming. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were so popular, they proved to be irreplaceable. So
Pardon Us, along with such shorts such as
BlottoBlotto is a 1930 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.-Plot:During the prohibition period, Laurel and Hardy make plans to spend a wild night out at the Rainbow Club. Phoning Stan at home, Ollie suggests a ruse by which Stan is to convince his wife, who keeps him on a short...
,
Chickens Come HomeChickens Come Home is a 1931 short film starring Laurel and Hardy, directed by James W. Horne and produced by Hal Roach. It was shot in January, 1931 and released on February 21, 1931...
, and
Below ZeroBelow Zero is a 1930 short film starring Laurel and Hardy, directed by James Parrott and produced by Hal Roach- Plot :Street musicians Laurel and Hardy have no success earning money on a bleak, snowy winter's day, especially when playing In the Good Old Summertime. Their instruments are destroyed...
had a French and Spanish version. Laurel and Hardy spoke their lines phonetically, and many supporting roles were recast, including
Boris KarloffBoris Karloff was a British actor who emigrated to Canada in the 1910s. He is best remembered for his roles in horror films and his portrayal of Frankenstein's monster in the 1931 film Frankenstein, 1935 film Bride of Frankenstein, and 1939 film Son of Frankenstein...
playing "The Tiger" in the French version, before he became famous in
FrankensteinFrankenstein is a horror film from Universal Pictures directed by James Whale and very loosely based on the novel of the same name by Mary Shelley as well as the play adapted from it by Peggy Webling. The film stars Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff, and features Dwight Frye...
premiered in theaters on November 21, 1931.
Availability
Three prints of different length are in circulation today. The 56-minute version is the common one, and the one which most viewers have seen over the years. In the mid-1980s, the
3M3M Company, formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation....
company issued a series of L&H films on laserdisc and used a long-lost preview print of
Pardon Us for this series. It ran nine minutes longer than all previous prints, and contained additional footage with the warden, another scene with The Boys in solitary confinement (although this is really a duplication of an earlier scene with different dubbed lines from The Boys in their cells), and second performance of "Hand Me Down My Silver Trumpet Gabriel" in re-edited cotton field footage. Though this longer version has not been issued on home video (the 3M series was discontinued in the late 80's), it has been shown several times on the cable network AMC. The 64-minute version also aired on
TCMTurner Classic Movies is a cable television channel featuring commercial-free classic movies, mostly from the Turner Entertainment and MGM, United Artists, RKO and Warner Bros. film libraries...
's
April FoolApril Fool can refer to:*April Fools' Day, a notable day celebrated in many countries on April 1**April Fool's Day for other uses*April Fool , the codename for a double agent who allegedly played a role in the downfall of Saddam Hussein...
's Day salute to Laurel and Hardy. Finally, in 2004,
Universal StudiosUniversal Studios , a subsidiary of NBC Universal, is one of the six major American movie studios. Its main motion picture production/distribution arm is called Universal Pictures. Its production studios are located at 100 Universal City Plaza Drive in Universal City, California...
issued a
DVDDVD, also known as Digital Versatile Disc or Digital Video Disc,is an optical disc storage media format, and was founded in 1995. Its main uses are video and data storage...
which includes a restored black-and-white version with added scenes taken from preview copies (including the fire scene where the boys rescue the warden's daughter) as well as a shorter computor-colour version.
See also
- 1931 in film
-Academy Awards:*Best Picture: Cimarron - MGM*Best Actor: Lionel Barrymore - A Free Soul*Best Actor: Wallace Beery - The Champ*Best Actor: Fredric March - Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde*Best Actress: Marie Dressler - Min and Bill...
- Laurel and Hardy films
This is a list of films which either star or feature the comedy team of Laurel and Hardy. Together, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in 106 short films and features....
- Boris Karloff filmography
This is a filmography of Boris Karloff. Born as William Henry Pratt, he joined a touring company and adopted the stage name Boris Karloff. During these early stages of his career he was mostly left in obscurity. By 1919, Karloff found regular work as an extra at Universal Studios. Karloff's first...