ShareThis"LAUREL AND HARDY: THE ESSENTIAL COLLECTION." (NOT RATED. VARIOUS DATES. RHI ENTERTAINMENT. $99.98.)
Of all the comic duos that achieved great popularity (Abbott and Costello, Martin and Lewis, Rowan and Martin, etc.), none has had anything near the shelf life of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
Even when they're not all that funny -- they often aren't -- there is something about them that's archetypal and universal. Partly it's physical: Generations referred to them not by name, but as fat and skinny. And partly it's the configuration of their personalities -- one passive and invincible; the other excitable, irritable, people-pleasing and always defeated.
This new collection finally does them justice. It's on 10 DVDs, with more than 30 hours of features and shorts all remastered from the best possible original material, from their first talkies through the early '40s. The collection even includes short films by other people in which they made brief appearances, including one color short, so you can see what they really looked like.
But to me the most amazing things on this set are the foreign-language versions. In the earlier talkie era, American studios would redo their films for their foreign markets. So we have entire films of Laurel and Hardy speaking Spanish and French. What's more, because foreign countries liked longer films, the 20-minute shorts would be extended to 35 or 40 minutes, with various other bits.
If you love these guys -- I don't, but I like them -- this collection will be a source of almost inexhaustible pleasure. The list price is steep, but you can find it for a lot less.
"TREASURES 5: THE WEST 1898-1938." (NOT RATED. IMAGE ENTERTAINMENT. $59.98.)
This is the fifth in the remarkable "Treasures" series by the National Film Preservation Foundation. The films come from various archives and have never been seen on any home-video format. Some are feature films. Some are narrative shorts. Others are documentary shorts or newsreels.
For the most part, these films have been unseen for decades and were completely unknown to anyone outside the respective archives in which they were housed. So what we get to see is something miraculous. The dead wake up from a long sleep, sometimes a 100-year-long sleep, and start talking to us. It's a privilege to see them.
The latest collection focuses on the West, as in cowboys and Western mythology. The three-DVD set brings together footage of authentic Western characters -- such as Indians greeting President Warren G. Harding in 1921 --with early and later Western films, in which we can see the codification of the Western genre.
Also included are a number of features set in the West, including the Clara Bow film "Mantrap" (1926), which dates from the actress' heyday.
The transfers are stunning. The music has been carefully considered and the narration is informative and first-rate. This is a quality collection.
(Email Mick LaSalle at mlasalle(at)sfchronicle.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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