Laurel and Hardy are asked about wood for five minutes. “The Tree in a Test Tube” (1942).

 

Good morning completists.  If you’re committed to watching every single Laurel and Hardy film (and you are!  you know you are!), then you’re committed to watching The Tree in a Test Tube (1942).

This film is cherished because it is comic footage of Stan and Ollie deliberately shot in colour (rather than vandalised/colourised decades later).  It’s also a silent performance, narrated by Pete Smith.  Shot in the Fox studio lot during a lunch hour, it forms the first half of a documentary produced by the US Department of Agriculture.

Pete Smith (off-screen narrator) hails the boys, who appear to be going on a fishing trip, and asks them if either of them have any wood on them.  As they frisk themselves in a state of puzzlement, they are told that countless everyday objects have some wood component, including many plastics.  Ollie suggests that Stan’s head is made of wood.  It isn’t.  They go through their pockets and suitcase and discover the myriad of ways in which wood products can be processed so as to efface all visible traces of their sylvan origin.  Along the way, Stan is embarrassed by a pair of nylon stockings and some amusing shorts.  Their wood demonstration over, they are told they can go, but have to chase their own taxi.

These five minutes were filmed a few days before Pearl Harbour.  When the eleven minute documentary is finally screened in movie theatres, Stan and Ollie’s footage now forms part of a wartime information film in which all these applications for wood product possess military urgency.  The wood that used to go into Stan and Ollie’s holiday toiletries is now being used to build barracks, pontoon bridges and crucial aircraft components.  Science can transform trees in ways that will assuredly lick Hitler.

It is fun to see Stan and Ollie deliberately in colour.  It is noteworthy, that Stan’s hair is smooth and flat rather than fluffed up.  This may be the only occasion when Stan’s hair is flat while Stan is in deliberate and rehearsed “character”.  Please correct me if I’m wrong.  And although this little skit is brief enough, it demonstrates more of Stan and Ollie in character than two hours of Stan and Ollie in Great Guns or A Haunting We Will Go.  If you’ve just watched those two films, then watching A Tree in a Test Tube is a bit like a fleeting reunion with old friends.

We live in less innocent times – or so we’re always being told.  I enjoy five minutes of Stan and Ollie being asked about wood.  But Beavis and Butthead would probably enjoy it more.