Let’s enjoy the last week of 2024 by spending twenty minutes a day with Laurel and Hardy in the late 1920s. If you love L&H (and lets face it, you have to be a bit of a hard case not too) you undoubtedly know their early-to-mid 1930s sound shorts. Since most of us over the age of forty were first exposed to them on television, the talking L&H films were likely all we knew since silent film and television rarely went together. But L&H made a number of silents that are delightfully funny and unusual and rarely watched except by extreme fans. Though I knew of their existence for years, I never sought them out and only started watching them a few years ago on YouTube, wrongly assuming that robbed of their voices the boys wouldn’t be nearly as funny nor would they resemble the characters I knew them as. Of course I was wrong–as I so frequently am. Anyhow, let’s watch a clutch of them, beginning with ‘We Faw Down’, from 1928. The advent of sound is already on the horizon and this beautifully restored print includes the original synchronized music and effects track–an early taste for audiences of what sound would have to offer. (The effects are modest–a gun shot, a woman laughing, etc. but charmingly accomplished). The score is beautifully crafted, using half-a-dozen popular songs of the day that reflect the action–“That’s My Weakness Now’, ‘What’ll I Do?’, ‘Give Me A Little Kiss, Will ya, Huh?”, “It All Depends On You” are all interwoven at the appropriate junctures. The justifiably famous final shot is a miraculously choreographed moment featuring acrobatics that are still painful and hilarious to watch. Even the opening image of Leo The Lion (the film, though produced by Hal Roach, was distributed by MGM) is a hoot; Leo doesn’t roar in the manner we are accustomed to. Instead he exhibits an odd facial twitch, as if pooh-poohing his presence at the start of a two-reel slapstick comedy…