If you want a quick capsule review of the Blu-ray set, here it is: This is one of the most important home video releases of the year, and I’m highly recommending it. The combination of childlike roughhousing, unbreakable friendship, surprising violence, and large-scale destruction are comedy gold. How could they not be? It’s Laurel & Hardy. In brief, while some of the films are more delightful than others, they are all entertaining, amusing, and precious. Consequently, it made sense to provide my capsule reviews of each film alongside the technical details. There has been a lot of discussion online about the picture quality of the features and shorts within the collection, so I thought I should address each film individually. Unlike most of my reviews, my thoughts on each of the films appears below in the “ Video” section.
#LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES TO BUY FULL#
The set also represents the home video debut of the restoration of the silent short, The Battle of the Century, which contains a full reel of footage previously thought lost. Two features ( Sons of the Desert and Way Out West) and seventeen of their finest short subjects (including my favorite, Busy Bodies) are presented in 2K and 4K transfers from the finest surviving elements.
#LAUREL AND HARDY MOVIES TO BUY ARCHIVE#
The UCLA Film and Television Archive has undertaken a years-long restoration of the Laurel & Hardy films, and their painstaking labor has paid off in a new 4-disc Blu-ray set, Laurel & Hardy: The Definitive Restorations. Several of the team’s movies only exist in 35mm dupe prints (or in some cases 16mm) that are several generations away from the original camera negative. Also, like many late silents and early talkies, some of the negatives are missing or have decomposed beyond repair. In many cases, the negatives were damaged, due to overprinting. Unfortunately, due to the popularity of the movies, the films no longer exist in pristine form. Few movies are more beloved than the shorts and features starring the classic comedy team of Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy.
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