Habeas Corpus (Hal Roach Studios, MGM, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 10) Turner Classic Movies did a “Silent Sunday Showcase” night featuring four two-reel comedy shorts by Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy: Habeas Corpus, Putting Pants on Philip, Two Tars, and You’re Darn Tootin’. The last three are acknowledged comedy masterpieces and I’d looked forward to seeing them again. They’re also movies I’ve previously posted about on moviemagg, so I was surprised when I looked online for a previous Habeas Corpus review and found one: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/10/dr-pyckle-and-mr-pryde-joe-rock.html. My husband Charles and I had seen it before at a 2021 event at the San Diego Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, the year that due to the gradual wind-down of the COVID-19 lockdowns the summer organ festival, including its annual “Not-So-Silent Movie Night,” took place in September and October instead of the usual July and August. That year’s “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” took place on Saturday, October 30, the day before Hallowe’en, and was partially Hallowe’en-themed. Along with Habeas Corpus it contained a film by Stan Laurel without Oliver Hardy called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925), a spoof of the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde starring John Barrymore in the title role(s); and Buster Keaton’s The Haunted House (1922). In my previous post I gave special praise to the organist, Mark Herman, for (among other things) his real flair for jazz. I wasn’t that impressed by the films themselves, and Habeas Corpus is still an O.K. movie rather than a truly great one. It starts at the home of mad scientist Professor Padilla (Richard Carle), who is lamenting to his butler and assistant Ledoux (Charley Rogers) that he needs a freshly dead human body for his latest experiment to prove his theory that, as the intertitle claims, “the human brain has a level surface – in some instances perfectly flat.”

Laurel and Hardy show up at Padilla’s door begging for food – in Laurel’s case, particularly buttered toast – and instead get offered $500 (jointly or severally?) to go to the local graveyard and steal a recently deceased body. The remaining 15 minutes of this 20-minute movie drag predictably as Laurel and Hardy go through a series of repetitive gags as they try to break into the cemetery and steal a body while Ledoux, who’s really an undercover police officer trying to get the goods on Padilla, follows them there wearing a white sheet disguised as a ghost. Habeas Corpus is only mildly effective and funny, though even at less than full strength Laurel and Hardy are great clowns. Incidentally the film was originally released with a synchronized soundtrack, and that version is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vWleZnEN_w. The version TCM showed last night had a fresh (well, 2013 anyway) soundtrack by Robert Israel which, like the movie itself, was O.K. but wasn’t much. It ends with Laurel and Hardy carrying a bag with Ledoux inside and being predictably startled when Ledoux’s feet start sticking out of the bag and he tries to walk until he and Hardy fall into a giant manhole (the same one used to much greater comic effect at the end of Putting Pants on Philip) and Laurel helplessly trying to get them out of there. Habeas Corpus is credited to director James Parrott (brother of Charley Chase, three of whose shorts were last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature) but with Leo McCarey, a comic genius at the level of Laurel and Hardy themselves, credited as “supervising director.” It was apparently McCarey’s idea to lift Laurel and Hardy from the amorphous ranks of Hal Roach’s “Comedy All-Stars” and feature them as leads, and it was also he who invented the “tit-for-tat” style of comic fighting in which, instead of having at each other willy-nilly as in most movie fights, the two combatants each take turns and patiently wait for the other’s retaliation. He made enough good movies – including the Marx Brothers’ masterpiece, Duck Soup (1933) – I can forgive him this lapse (as well as his truly rancid politics: he was a supporter of the Hollywood blacklist and director of the 1952 anti-Communist propaganda piece My Son John, with Robert Walker in his last film as a naïve young rich kid who gets swept into joining the Communist Party).