For a production I had no knowledge of until a few days ago, this was a wise choice for viewing last night. Early Monday afternoon, Turner Classic Movies played this; I was not able to watch and the copy available on Prime is a few minutes short, so I went to TCM's website and streamed it there. If you have the right cable provider-as I do-they always offer a variety of pictures for streaming purposes. Before talking about its content, it has to be noted: unlike its description on Letterboxd, it does NOT and has never featured Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields or Harold Lloyd.
This product-released by 20th Century Fox!-is a compilation of various silent comedy shorts from either Hal Roach or Mack Sennett. It is divided into various segments and the talent featured was mainly those I hadn't seen before. It was either names I knew and hadn't seen (Will Rogers, Charlie Chase) or people unknown to me beforehand, like the cross-eyed Ben Turpin, Billy Bevan or Harry Langdon. There's also silent film appearances from Carole Lombard and Jean Harlow but Laurel & Hardy received the lion's share of the attention. Apparently, The Golden Age of Comedy was popular enough to the point that Laurel & Hardy became well-known to the public again after languishing in obscurity for awhile.
All those funny clips could have played differently in context to the shorts they were extracted from; on the other side of the coin, that footage typically did make me chuckle at the very least and there were some pretty solid laughs. For a dork like me, it was a thrill to see footage that may at times be impossible to track down and learn about talent who were popular around 100 years ago and unfortunately are little-known even to the type of individuals that populate Letterboxd. It was breezy entertainment at 79 minutes in length & if you think of the heart emoji whenever thinking about silent comedy shorts, this is a must.
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