Themes: Nothing Goes Right, Escape From Prison, Assumed Identities
Main Cast: Oliver Hardy, Stan Laurel
Release Year: 1927
Country: US
Run Time: 23 minutes
Plot
Laurel and Hardy are stripe-suited convicts in a cramped penitentiary cell. Seemingly model prisoners, they actually spend every available moment in digging a secret tunnel to freedom. Unfortunately, this only brings them up in the warden's office and lands them back in their cell. Breaking rocks in the yard, the pair turn their uniforms inside out and assume the role of painters -- painting their way right out of prison, down a city street and into a conveniently arriving limousine. Again switching clothes, they are now forced to pose as the limos occupants -- a pair of prison officials from France -- and are welcomed as distinguished guests at the jailhouse they've just escaped from! Having turned their reception banquet into a shambles, but somehow maintaining their pose, the pair are exposed by the welcoming cries of their old inmate pals as they tour the prison cellblock. Released as the first of Hal Roach's Laurel and Hardy series (though not their first film together), The Second-Hundred Years is one of their early classics of honed characterization, pacing and structure, originating gags and routines reused and reworked by Laurel and Hardy (not to mention numerous other comedians) for years to come. ~ All Movie Guide
Review
Pairing a fat man and a skinny man in a comedic context has worked successfully at least since Shakespeare's time, but could producer Hal Roach possibly have known what he was starting when he turned Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy into an official screen team with this silent comedy? Beyond the comic bits devised by screenwriter Leo McCarey -- which served not only Laurel & Hardy (across various sound-era remakes, but also the Three Stooges for many years to come -- it's amazing to see how many of the elements that would work for them in their subsequent movies across the next dozen years were already in place. The latter include the presence on the cast of James Finlayson and Charlie Hall, and Tiny Sandford (and if one looks closely, one can also spot Eugene Pallette in a small role). And apart from some sight gags that wouldn't translate well to the sound era, most of what the team needed to work with was present in their repertory, in this still very funny prison comedy, which they would drawing laughs from for years to come. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
The Second Hundred Years is a 1927 short comedy silent film starring Laurel and Hardy as convicts making an escape from prison. Their heads were shaved for their appearance in this film, and their hair had not yet grown back in their roles in Max Davidson's Call Of The Cuckoo (1927), released a week after this film.
Chapters — called Tents — of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy Appreciation Society, all take their names from L&H films; there is a The Second Hundred Years Tent on Long Island, New York.
