One of the greatest comedy teams of all time, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared in hundreds of shorts before starring as a pair of hoboes in the 1927 short DUCK SOUP (no relation to the Marx Brothers movie). “Ollie” got into the motion picture business as a theater operator at the age of seventeen, who thought he could do better than the bums he saw on screen and set out for Jacksonville, FL (then a burgeoning city for film production), and Stan began his career as an understudy to Charlie Chaplin. This selection of restored 35mm prints represents some of their very best and uproarious work from the last days of silent cinema: Stan and Ollie star as sailors on shore leave stuck in a traffic jam (TWO TARS, 1928), stable workers (WRONG AGAIN, 1929), Christmas Tree salesman (BIG BUSINESS, 1929), and mud slinging golfers (SHOULD MARRIED MEN GO HOME, 1928). Sons of the Desert members welcome.

Special thanks to Todd Wiener and Steven K. Hill at UCLA Film and Television Archive, Lynanne Schweighofer at the Library of Congress, and Jeff Joseph.