User Reviews

On the Platinum DVD Laurel and Hardy collection that I found this short in, Stick Around is called Paper Hangers Helper. Similar to The Music Box in which Laurel and Hardy try to install a piano, this short has Hardy and a now forgotten fellow named Bobby Ray trying to paint and put wallpapers inside a sanitarium. Actually, Ray does most of the attempts at painting and wallpapering while Hardy either orders him around or sleeps in. Many of the gags involve Ray accidentally wallpapering Hardy with a lion's head or himself with a skeleton (with a black worker getting scared each time, how racist!), Ray accidentally painting other people (shades of The Second Hundred Years) and Hardy accidentally spilling paint on other people. There's also a scene of a man with a long beard that Ray cuts because it's stuck with paste! Hardy and Ray act so much like a team that it takes a while to realize Laurel is not here since the copy I saw had no credits (except for home movie distributor Castle Films). Stick Around/Paper Hangers Helper is funny enough and has many touches that Hardy would eventually share with Laurel but is no classic. Worth seeing, however. By the way, this was produced by Billy West, an actor who once performed with Hardy.

"Stick Around" is one of the brief series of films that paired Bobby Ray with Oliver 'Babe' Hardy before Hardy's immortal teaming with Stan Laurel. Several critics have suggested that Ray and Hardy -- the gormless little man and the overbearing big man -- were a prototype for Laurel and Hardy, but that simply isn't true. Ray and Hardy play off each other well, but really aren't a team; in each of these films, Ray has more footage and is clearly meant to be the hero, while Hardy bullies him in a manner very much unlike his later "Ollie" character's treatment of "Stanley". It's very clear that the relationship between little Bobby and big Babe was inspired by earlier Chaplin films, in which the Little Tramp was bullied by huge Mack Swain or burly Eric Campbell.

However, in "Stick Around", Hardy sports a bowler hat that's identical to his later "Ollie" titfer (although with a fuller moustache), and he and Bobby -- after spending most of this movie as adversaries -- end up as drunken comrades.

Bobby is a paperhanger for the firm of Matz and Blatz, with Hardy as his boss. When the tardy Bobby tries to pretend he showed up promptly, there's some clever physical business between the two men that reminds me of a routine performed by Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in 'The Garage'. A bit later, Bobby Ray -- whose brief acting career never firmly developed a screen persona -- performs an "impossible" gag that would have been inappropriate for Stan Laurel, when he pulls a long stepladder out of a much smaller toolkit.

The paperhangers go to work in a sanitarium, and there are the usual unrealistic depictions of mental illness: one resident insists on sitting on a piece of toast because he thinks he's a poached egg! There are also some howlingly racist (and tastelessly unfunny) gags involving a black man who obligingly lets the inmates crack open walnuts on top of his head. When he sees a *picture* of a lion -- not even a photograph, mind you -- he goes all cowardly as if it were an actual wild animal.

"Stick Around" is fairly dire. Most of the pantomime and acting is much broader than it needs to be for a slapstick comedy; even Hardy, already a very subtle actor by 1925, pongs badly with his over-acting here. There are several bad examples of shot-matching. I was impressed with one unusual camera set-up, when a fat pedestrian's face is dirtied and we see a close-up of his reflection in a hand mirror, rather than his actual face.

SPOILERS COMING. During their brief pairing, Hardy typically played Ray's boss or adversary or both; here, for once, they end up as pals. It's a nice ending, but it doesn't make up for what's really a poor film. My rating for this one is only 4 out of 10.

SPOILERS I have this on a grab bag disc with random solo Hardy and Laurel silent skits. It's nice to watch stuff I have not seen them in. I was surprised it was made in 1925 though, it looks much older, like 1915. It's weird in that the two boys get drunk and start making out kind of, very strange. The parts with the guy with the 3 foot long beard was very funny to me. And other scenes like the circus wallpaper and people getting wallpapered was lame but it was so bad it was stupid funny. Good short must see for sure for L&H fans. Another reason why I thought this was older then 1925, that nurse is cute but kind of fat, in a hot for 1915 way. My version called it The Paperhangers Helper and was probably edited down then what other reviewers watched. 7 out of 10 for the two guys drunk making out scene and 3 foot long beard crazy guy.

The specs for this film in the IMDb credits state that there are 24 and 12 minute versions, and one of the reviewers here comments on scenes I didn't see, so I have to limit my remarks to the shorter of the two. I've seen Bobby Ray in another short with 'Babe' Hardy, and his resemblance to Stan Laurel is rather uncanny. However the chemistry just isn't there between Ray and Hardy and one needn't wonder why this particular duo didn't go very far. However the picture itself crams a lot of slapstick into it's brief run time, and though I'm not that much of an early film short buff, this one has to be one of the first, if not THE first to make effective use of all those ladder and paint bucket pratfalls that comedy teams from Laurel and Hardy on down would get so much mileage out of. Even though many of these films aren't very good from a story telling or cinematic perspective, they're still worth catching for brief insights into the early days of film making and how early comedians came to develop their craft.