Silent Era : Home Video Reviews

Silent Era Home Page > Home Video > The Lost Films of Laurel and Hardy, Volume One

Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved.

The Lost Films of
Laurel and Hardy
Volume One
(1918-1929)

Contents: Hustling for Health (1919), On the Front Page (1926), Call of the Cuckoo (1927), Do Detectives Think? (1927), The Finishing Touch (1928) and Big Business (1929).

Hal Roach Studios
1998 DVD edition

The Lost Films of Laurel and Hardy, The Complete Collection, Volume One (1918-1929), black & white, 124 minutes total, not rated, including Hustling for Health (1919), black & white, 15 minutes, not rated, On the Front Page (1926), black & white, 23 minutes, not rated, Call of the Cuckoo (1927), black & white, 18 minutes, not rated, Do Detectives Think? (1927), black & white, 24 minutes, not rated, The Finishing Touch (1928), black & white, 23 minutes, not rated, and Big Business (1929), black & white, 18 minutes, not rated.

Hal Roach Studios, HRS 4791, UPC 0-14381-47912-6.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at 4.8 Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to 60 fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 mono sound encoded at 384 Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; 6 chapter stops; snapper DVD case (reissued in standard DVD keepcase); $29.99.
Release date: 22 December 1998.
Country of origin: USA

Ratings (1-10): video: 7 / audio: 6 / additional content: 7 / overall: 7.

This early DVD collection has been mastered from 35mm print elements. We have seen some of the films from this collection on laserdisc and VHS videotape, and we have seen other DVD releases in this series. Our hipshot opinion of the DVD is that some films will look very good (transferred from the original 35mm negatives) and others may be passable at best, usually films transferred from the best surviving material in the possession of Hal Roach Studios.

The films are accompanied by a cobbled-together soundtrack of vintage recordings, some from other Laurel and Hardy shorts, if not the film’s original synchronized soundtrack.

Read our review of volume three in this series for an idea of what to expect from this release.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.