How I love ‘lost films’. Especially when they resurface! There’s something so ghostly, so other-worldly, about a vanished movie that is, in fact, waiting patiently somewhere bizarre to be rediscovered. Many lost films turn up in New Zealand of all places. That’s because that was the last stop for prints of new American movies to be shipped–often local projectionists simply took the films home instead of going to the trouble and expense of shipping them back to the states. In any event, here we are with L&H’s once-thought lost ‘Duck Soup’ (1927), a very early effort. It turned up in the 1990s in Belgium and is quite a curiosity. You won’t laugh so much as marvel at the films strangeness. Oliver Hardy’s character has yet to be fully developed–he wears a thick beard and has none of his punctilious, fussy, faux-genteel mannerisms. Stan is Stan, fully formed and delightfully innocent and perplexed. The film is essential viewing for L&H completists even if its uneven, antique nature keeps it in the ‘interesting’ rather than the ‘wonderful’ column. Tomorrow we’ll watch one of their funniest, ‘Big Business’. For now, swallow your medicine and happy frigging New Year…