The Battle of the Century (1927)

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival screened a nearly complete nicely restored copy of The Battle of the Century this weekend (6/4/16). Except for the still-missing part of reel one (the scene with the boys and Eugene Palette in the park), the film is now complete. And the pie fight is all that all of us have hoped for all of these years! Admittedly the newly found material is more of the same, but the same is wonderful! The new print was accomplished by Lobster Films with help from MOMA, the Library of Congress and Blackhawk films. I can find no information about a release so let's start a ground swell for a DVD copy. Please? We're begging you!

This is the first comment of a series of films where I'm attempting to connect two legendary comedy teams: Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello. For this initial one-The Battle of the Century-we're at a time when Hal Roach's duo of a thin Englishman and a heavyset Georgia man were just starting their creative chemistry to an adoring public while a young and thin man (at the time) in his twenties from Patterson, New Jersey, was just attempting to break out in Hollywood any way he can which includes stunt work and occasional extra parts. It's here that Lou Costello makes an appearance in the audience of a boxing match between Stan and Noah Young with Ollie being Stan's manager. Half the time watching I was a little distracted looking for Costello but I still managed to laugh at Stan's antics in the boxing ring. I especially loved his dance at the beginning. I half wondered if Lou thought of this sequence when he did his own comic fights in later A & C vehicles. It certainly was amusing enough for the first reel which for years afterward was considered lost until 1979 when Richard Feiner managed to find it. It's the second part with the legendary pie fight that this film's reputation rests. Good thing when compilation producer Robert Youngston was looking for clips to include in his first project on classic silent comedy-The Golden Age of Comedy-he found what was a decomposing second reel and managed to preserve the last 5 or so minutes of it. Among the classic supporting actors long associated with L & H that appeared in this sequence was Charlie Hall and, in perhaps the most iconic moment at the end, Anita Garvin. The Nostalgia Archive video tape that I watched this one on actually had two versions on it. The first presented the first reel intact before going to the pie sequence. The second had the first reel again before going to a surviving script that details another sequence with Eugene Palette in which he sells Ollie an insurance on Stan. From there, Ollie then tries to get Stan to slip on a banana peel to collect the money before a cop gets mixed up in it. With the script, some stills, and then the Youngston-edited sequence, we get an as complete as possible version of this long truncated short. In summary, The Battle of the Century is well worth viewing for L & H fans as well as Lou Costello completists. Update-9/24/11: I just watched this again at an outdoor screening at the Baton Rouge Gallery with musical accompaniment by The Incense Merchants, whose contemporary stylings add to the fun immensely, but with the stills and script pages representing the missing scenes deleted. At least one female member of the audience behind me laughed as loud as I did. She must have been as much of an L & H fan as me!

This is one of the lost films of Laurel and Hardy--or at least partially lost. Today only about half of the film remains--all of the boxing sequence (which is pretty good) and bits and pieces of the giant pie fight. The rest, sadly, appears gone forever, though fans of the team hold out hope--after all, newly discovered bits and pieces have been found of many great supposedly missing or truncated films (such as the great recent find of a longer version of METROPOLIS). Because this film isn't totally intact, it's not fair that anyone should have to give it a numerical score, but IMDb forces this for all reviews. My score of 6 is because I really didn't think much of the pie fight and there just isn't enough of the original film left to get a better score.By the way, according to IMDb, Lou Costello is an extra at ring side. I looked but couldn't really tell he was there. Perhaps he was the guy who caught Hardy at the end of the fight. The problem is that Costello would have been a lot thinner and younger--as he had himself been an amateur boxer about this same time period.As far as pie fights go, this is probably the best and was the inspiration for the one in THE GREAT RACE many years later. Despite people thinking this is a slapstick cliché, there were actually very few pie fights ever shown on film and the few that did occur were rarely as big or crazy as this one--usually just a pie or two (like you'd see in a couple of The Three Stooges' films).Also, and this is an odd one, during the fight scene, you see a pretty lady walking by "The Pink Pup". This is the same place you see featured in THAT'S MY WIFE and THEIR PURPLE MOMENT--two other silent Laurel and Hardy shorts.If you do want to see this ten minute film, it's included in the huge UK DVD Laurel and Hardy collection.

Only about 50%+ remains of The Battle Of The Century, which is a huge tragedy as the footage we do have indicates this is one of the best silent shorts of the screens greatest comedy team. The opening boxing bout is extremely funny, with a sly take on the famous "long count". Cue much missing footage which gives form to the basic plot - Ollie, as Stan's manager, realises the only way to earn money from his Chumpion is to deliberately injure him and collect on the insurance! The legendary pie fight, which, on viewing, can be discerned as missing several shots at least - more likely a minute or two has gone - only makes me pine for the full version. If, oh wonderful miracle, a rediscovery occurs, you can almost certainly add three stars to the above rating.They were great, weren't they?