MovieChat Forums > Block-Heads (1938) Discussion > Are these classed as feature-length film...

Are these classed as feature-length films?

posted 17 years ago by mikeygs007
2 replies | jump to latest

Hi there, I'm just posting this new topic on here to try and clear something up. Out of all the episodes that Laurel & Hardy have done together, some have had a running time longer than others, in regions of around an hour or more.

Here's a short list of these I've found:

> Sons Of The Desert (68 mins)
> Our Relations (73 mins)
> Pack Up Your Troubles (68 mins)
> Pardon Us (56 mins)
> Way Out West (65 mins)

My question is this, are these I've listed above classed as 'films' or just another 'episode' or 'sketch' just like all the others.

Thanks very much!

MGS-NUFC

"The House Always Wins!" - MGS

[–] cinefool 17 years ago

All of the L&H films you cited are considered feature-length movies. Back in the 30's, it was not uncommon for motion pictures to top out at just over an hour. Laurel and Hardy's producer, Hal Roach, believed that "less is more" when it came to slapstick comedy. When Roach was asked about the current comedy films shortly before his death in 1992, he said "They're just too long".

In the case of the L&H films, another reason they are short is because a significant amount of footage might have been cut after previews. This is certainly true of "Pardon Us", which lost about 20 minutes of it's running time in the editing process. Some of those missing sequences were retained in the foreign-language versions of the film, to please overseas distributors who requested longer features.

[–] mlanoue 16 years ago

Yes, the "restored" version of pardon us is about 70 minutes, compared to the theatrical release at 56 minutes. As nice as it is to see the extra stuff, it loses some of it's pacing. Stan Laurel usually did a lot of the editing on their films, and if he thought it was better at 56 minutes, who am I to disagree? The shorter one should be considered the definitive version. (This isn't always the case, of course, especially with "Pack Up Your Troubles," which had some pre-code era meanness cut out later on for reissue.)