Detained | |
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![]() "The Hanging Scene" | |
Directed by | Scott Pembroke Joe Rock |
Written by | Tay Garnett |
Produced by | Joe Rock |
Starring | Stan Laurel |
Distributed by | Film Booking Offices of America (FBO) |
Release date |
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Running time | 20 minutes |
Country | United States |
Languages | Silent film English intertitles |
Detained is a 1924 American silent comedy film starring Stan Laurel. [1] In 2018, the Frisian Film Archive (Fries Film Archief) in Leeuwarden, Netherlands, was able to recover and restore a specific scene deemed lost. In "The Hanging Scene", Stan Laurel gets an extreme extended neck when he accidentally falls head first into the gallows, while trying to escape the prison. In 2017, a Dutch employee (Jurjen Enzing, 1987) found the footage in their archive and after restoration the entire movie including the scene was uploaded to YouTube. [2] The scene was to be shown at the Bristol Slapstick Festival in January 2018. [3]
Stan is watering big trees with a watering can. An escaped convict beckons him over and swaps clothes before running off. An armed warden grabs him and takes him to the prison. A group of female visitors arrive but the basket is too wide to fit through the bars. Stan eventually gets the cake from the basket. A fly in the cream disturbs him. He asks the warden to borrow his gun which he gets, but killing the fly destroys the cake.
At wash time the prisoners are released and Stan tries to sneak off. In the washroom he shares a bowl of soapy water with another convict. When Stan sits down the bowl is catapulted over the warden.
Stan wanders into the execution room and sits in the electric chair. A second man falls in the chair and drifts up to heaven after exploding.
Outside Stan narrowly avoids getting hit with a pick by a convict digging a tunnel. The tunnel comes into a room full of explosives. Stan hammers a stick of dynamite into the wall and they blow a hole into the chief warden's office. The convict and the warden fight. Stan tries to knock out the warden but hits the convict instead. A girl who entered the room tells the warden that Stan saved him.
Stan is released the next day, and he cries as he says goodbye to the head warden and the girl. He walks off with the warden's wallet and watch.
Slapstick is a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy. Slapstick may involve both intentional violence and violence by mishap, often resulting from inept use of props such as saws and ladders.
Laurel and Hardy were a British-American comedy duo act during the early Classical Hollywood era of American cinema, consisting of Englishman Stan Laurel (1890–1965) and American Oliver Hardy (1892–1957). Starting their career as a duo in the silent film era, they later successfully transitioned to "talkies". From the late 1920s to the mid-1950s, they were internationally famous for their slapstick comedy, with Laurel playing the clumsy, childlike friend to Hardy's pompous bully. Their signature theme song, known as "The Cuckoo Song", "Ku-Ku", or "The Dance of the Cuckoos" was heard over their films' opening credits, and became as emblematic of them as their bowler hats.
Stan Laurel was an English comic actor, writer, and film director who was one half of the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. He appeared with his comedy partner Oliver Hardy in 107 short films, feature films, and cameo roles.
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Pie-Eyed is a 1925 American silent comedy film starring Stan Laurel. The film is made at the peak of the Prohibition era so is dealing with "illegal activity" even if it is in a humorous manner. The club owner appears a mix of Gene Tunney and Jack Johnson the latter being a well-known owner of speakeasies.
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Not About Nightingales is a three-act play by Tennessee Williams in 1938. He wrote the play late in 1938, after reading in a newspaper about striking inmates of a Holmesburg, Pennsylvania, prison in August 1938, who had been placed in "an isolation unit lined with radiators, where four died from temperatures approaching 150 degrees.".