Laurel & Hardy’s ‘Silent Years’ Getting A Masters Of Cinema Release

Possibly the greatest comic duo to ever grace the big screen, Laurel & Hardy. This July Eureka Entertainment will release Laurel & Hardy: The Silent Years (1929) restored to 2K released on Blu-ray part of The Masters Of Cinema series.

Two of the most talented comedians to ever grace the silver screen, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy had firmly established their enduring partnership by the time the age of talking pictures loomed at the end of the 1920s. As they made their final silent shorts together in 1929, they continued to build upon the double act forged in earlier films such as You’re Darn Tootin’, Should Married Men Go Home? and We Faw Down – and prepared themselves for success in the sound era.

This collection brings together the silent Laurel & Hardy shorts produced in 1929, as the boys reached new levels of fame and success: Liberty casts Stan and Ollie as fugitives on the run; in Wrong Again, the boys try to claim a reward by returning a lost horse to a bewildered millionaire seeking a stolen painting; That’s My Wife sees Ollie forced to choose between Stan and his spouse; in Big Business, the boys go door-to-door selling Christmas trees; in Unaccustomed As We Are, Ollie invites Stan over for dinner and attracts the ire of Mrs Hardy; Double Whoopee sees the boys take jobs at a fancy hotel; Berth Marks has them cause chaos on a sleeper train; in Bacon Grabbers, Stan and Ollie are bailiffs tasked with recovering a radio; and finally, in Angora Love, they try to conceal a goat that has become very, very attached to them.

The Masters of Cinema Series presents Laurel & Hardy’s final run of silent shorts, newly restored in 2K by Blackhawk Films from the finest available materials, in a special two-disc Blu-ray edition for the first time in the UK.

The set contains the following shorts: Liberty, Wrong Again, That’s My Wife, Big Business, Unaccustomed As We Are (Silent Version), Double Whoopee, Berth Marks (Silent Version), Bacon Grabbers and Angora Love (Silent Version)

Check out the box-set’s official Trailer…



LIMITED EDITION TWO-DISC BLU-RAY SPECIAL FEATURES:
Limited Edition of 2,000 copies | Limited edition O-Card slipcase featuring new artwork by Scott Saslow | Limited edition collector’s booklet featuring newly written notes on each film by writer and comedian Paul Merton and a new essay on frequent Laurel & Hardy collaborator James Finlayson by silent cinema expert Chris Grosvenor | 1080p HD presentations on Blu-ray from 2K restorations by Blackhawk Films of Liberty, Wrong Again, That’s My Wife, Big Business, Unaccustomed as We Are, Double Whoopee, Berth Marks, Bacon Grabbers and Angora Love | Scores by Robert Israel (Angora Love, Big Business and Double Whoopee), Neil Brand (Bacon Grabbers, Wrong Again and That’s My Wife), Andreas Benz (That’s My Wife, Unaccustomed as We Are and Berth Marks), Maud Nelissen (Big Business, Liberty) and Gaylord Carter (Big Business) | New audio commentaries on Liberty and Berth Marks by film writer Chris Seguin and Kyp Harness, author of The Art of Laurel & Hardy: Graceful Calamity in the Films | New audio commentaries on Double Whoopee, Unaccustomed As We Are and Wrong Again by film historian and writer David Kalat | New audio commentaries on Big Business and Angora Love by silent film accompanist Neil Brand | New audio commentaries on That’s My Wife and Bacon Grabbers by Glenn Mitchell, author of The Laurel and Hardy Encyclopedia | Alternate musical scores on select shorts including the Robert Youngson score for Liberty, newly restored by Stephen Horne | Unaccustomed As We Are alternate sound version | Alternate dubbed version of Double Whoopee | 1929 sound shorts They Go Boom! and The Hoose-Gow | New documentary by David Cairns and Fiona Watson | The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (excerpt) | Crazy Heights – Alternate Super 8 version of Liberty | Super 8 versions of Big Business, Double Whoopee and Angora Love | Stills Galleries | All extras subject to change