Rupert of Hee Haw (1924) Online

The Tony Curtis/Jack Lemmon classic The Great Race was dedicated to Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy and now after seeing Rupert Of Heehaw I can see why. A number of silent screen comics Laurel among them did short subjects that satirized some of the big box office films of the day. This film we are told is a sequel to The Prisoner Of Zenda.

In The Great Race there is an extended sequence where Jack Lemmon plays both the villainous Professor Fate and the perpetually inebriated monarch of a Zenda like Ruritanian country. He had to have seen this silent short subject and got down Stan Laurel's body movements to uncanny perfection. Stan is the king and his lookalike cousin. Ronald Colman and Stewart Granger he wasn't, but he was a Lemmon.

Playing the title role however was Laurel&Hardy perennial foil James Finlayson ever foiled in his dastardly attempts to seize power.

A few good laughs were seized however.

I just watched this Stan Laurel short on YouTube. He made this before his fateful teaming with Oliver Hardy. He plays two roles, a king and some kind of entertainer named Rudolph Razz who poses as him. James Finlayson is also in this. The king is actually kind of a lush who keeps falling and tripping. When Rudolph poses as him he gets a great greeting from Our Gang (Mickey Daniels, Mary Kornman, Ernie Morrison, Joe Cobb, and Jackie Condon) but when Rudolph pays most of his attention to Mary, Mickey gets jealous and kicks Rudolph in the you-know-where! Plenty of slapstick scenes was enough to make me laugh especially when they happen one after another for a more than a minute. Oh, and the leading lady-The Princess-is Mae Laurel-Stan's common law wife at the time. So on that note, I recommend Rupert of Hee Haw.

You would think that a parody of the film "Rupert of Hentzau" (a version of "The Prisoner of Zenda") would be a lot better--especially since Stan Laurel was in the lead. After all, in his pre-Laurel and Hardy days, he had done some very funny films that parodied the latest film hits. His "Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde" is a great send-off of "Dr. Jeckyl" and probably his best starring film of the era. "Mud and Sand" is also a funny parody of Valentino's "Blood and Sand". So why did this film turn out to be so very bad? Well, the problem wasn't the cast--Laurel and supporting actor James Finlayson could be very funny. However, the script had no jokes--absolutely none. A parody without jokes is stupid and that is about all I need to say about this dull film.

Yes, I cannot but agree with the other reviewer. This is quite astonishingly unfunny and Laurel must have worked quite hard to so effectively expunge all traces of humour from it.

However, Rupert of Hentzau is not "a version of The Prisoner of Zenda" but, in both literary and cinematic terms, the sequel to it and, as far as the books are concerned, an entirely worthy sequel too. Sadly there seems never to have been a decent film version of the second novel although one was promised after the 1937 film of The Prisoner of Zenda (the best and the most faithful, version with Ronald Colman and Douglas Fairbanks Junior) but, alas, was never made.

The parody is however right to bill itself as "the sequel" (to "the Prisoner of Zebra") in that it is not based on The Prisoner of Zenda, very creditably filmed by Metro in 1922 (director Rex Ingram), but, insofar as it is based on anything at all, on the sequel which appears to have been rather dismally filmed by Selznick in 1923 (lost film?). This film evidently laid stress on the king's fondness for alcohol (not a significant element in the book) which helped to render the story ridiculous but also made it in a sense topical (this was at the height of prohibition). Harry Edwards/Harry Langdon's Soldier Man (1926) is in part a (better) parody of the same film.