MOVIES

Comedy’s Sweet Weapon: The Cream Pie

By DAN BARRYJULY 8, 2015

A scene from “The Battle of the Century.” CreditMGM, via Photofest

Ah, the thrown pie. Among the sweetest delights in life is the sight of an airborne cream-and-crust concoction finding purchase. It is the great leveler, a puncturing of pretension, and those who find pie throwing beneath their refined comic sensibility deserve nothing more than a lemon meringue treat, smack in the kisser.

So it is with unrestrained glee that we share the news of the recovery of a long-missing portion of the greatest pie-throwing fight ever recorded, far superior to the pastry melee of “In the Sweet Pie and Pie,” a 1941 Three Stooges short, or the baked-goods battle in “The Great Race,” a 1965 comedy with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.

That, of course, would be the epic custard conflagration in “The Battle of the Century,” a 1927 Laurel and Hardy short that dispensed with 3,000 pies, thrown not with abandon but with slow-burn precision, heightening the comedic effect.

For several decades, the 20-minute, two-reel classic has been missing its second reel, which provided most of the logic for why dozens of people were pelting one another with pastries. Film historians have puttied the gaps in “Battle” with explanatory title cards, but these could never replicate Laurel’s look of thought-free innocence, Hardy’s frown of eternal exasperation.

“The Battle of the Century” from 1927 with Laurel and Hardy. CreditMGM, via Photofest

“It’s been a holy grail of comedy,” the film historian Leonard Maltin said of the second reel. “And that’s not overstating the case.”

But in June, Jon Mirsalis — prominent toxicologist by day, respected film collector and scholar by night — mentioned in passing at a film conference in Virginia that he had come upon the second reel of “The Battle of the Century.”

“There was an audible gasp in the room,” Mr. Mirsalis recalled. It was as if the audience had just been smacked in the face with a — you know.

Before we get into the details of Mr. Mirsalis’s gasp-inducing discovery, which was first reported by Silent London, a website dedicated to silent films, here is some context about the filmic art of pie throwing.

The first thrown pie in the face dates to the Mack Sennett era, probably to a 1913 Fatty Arbuckle short called “A Noise From the Deep.” Pow, some pastry to the mug, and there it was: An innocuous dessert being used as a weapon, leaving stains of cherry, perhaps, but not of blood.

“A visual non sequitur,” Steve Massa, a film historian and author, calls it. Absurd. Anarchic. Funny.

By the late 1920s, though, a pie fight was akin to shooting a man in the seat of his pants and having him jump up and down. The comedy cliché had become so familiar, Mr. Massa said, that it recurs more frequently in the collective mind than in actual film.

Those who have spent a lot of time contemplating thrown pies generally agree that the humor depends entirely on the setup — the raison d’être for that in-the-face moment. Mr. Maltin cited as an example a 1931 comedy short called “Good Pie Forever,” in which a young woman and her boyfriend drive around Brooklyn hitting people — newlyweds, policemen, judges — with pies.

That was it: Driving around, hitting people with pies.

“It is a dreadfully unfunny short,” Mr. Maltin said. “The mechanics of it are all wrong, as well as the comedic fundamentals.”

Scenes from “In the Sweet Pie and Pie,” a Three Stooges short film from 1941. CreditColumbia Pictures

Every once in a while, though, certain special ingredients — fundamentals, context and personality — were blended to create a sublime treat.

In 1927, Hal Roach Studios paired the veteran comedians Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy to create what would become the most beloved comic duo in cinema history. Among their first films that year was a parody of a recent boxing match in which Gene Tunney defeated Jack Dempsey after a referee’s controversial long count.

The gag writers came up with a story line that called for Laurel to lose a “long-count” fight, after which his manager, Hardy, would try to collect on an insurance policy by having Laurel slip on a banana peel (a cliché by then as well). One writer halfheartedly suggested the inclusion of a pie fight, eliciting groans.

But Laurel saw possibility. He later told John McCabe, the author of “Mr. Laurel & Mr. Hardy: An Affectionate Biography,” that he imagined a kind of Pie Armageddon: “Let’s give them so many pies that there never will be room for any more pie pictures in the whole history of the movies.”

So Hardy drops a banana peel intended for Laurel in front of Ye Olde Pie Shoppe. A pie deliveryman slips on the peel and reciprocates with a pie to Hardy’s face. Hardy throws a pie in return, only to connect with a young woman’s derrière. She turns, receives another in the face, takes her time wiping the goo from her eyes, and stomps over to escalate matters.

Soon pies are hitting everyone: a man in a top hat; a patient in a dentist’s chair; a sewer worker peering from a manhole; a lunch-counter patron; a man preening after his shave and haircut; a woman tending flowers. At one point, Laurel is inside the pie deliveryman’s truck, filling orders for cream-coated people seeking sweet revenge.

“The greatest comic film ever made — because it brought the pie-throwing to apotheosis,” the novelist Henry Miller once wrote. “There was nothing but pie-throwing in it, nothing but pies, thousands and thousands of pies and everybody throwing them right and left.”

With the advent of sound in the late 1920s, silent films became their own cliché and disappeared from movie theaters, including one that featured the pie fight of the century.

Thirty years later, the filmmaker Robert Youngson cobbled together a retrospective called “The Golden Age of Comedy.” During his research, he made a print of the negative of the second reel of “The Battle of the Century” but used only a few scenes of the pie fight in his documentary.

The nitrate negative fell apart and was thrown out. The first reel, which had also been missing, resurfaced in the late 1970s, allowing a new generation to see Laurel’s long-count antics in the ring. But the second reel appeared to be lost forever, its pie-tossed absurdity reduced to the few snippets chosen by Youngson.

Natalie Wood in “The Great Race” from 1965.CreditWarner Bros., via Photofest

In the rarefied world of film enthusiasts, collections are bought, sold, donated, divvied up, passed on. After Mr. Youngson died in 1974, three collectors, including a New Jersey lawyer named Gordon Berkow, bought his library. Mr. Berkow died in 2004, and his family eventually entrusted his collection of more than 2,300 films to Mr. Mirsalis, the toxicologist-cum-cinephile, who had been a friend of Mr. Berkow.

Mr. Mirsalis had these four tons of movie reels trucked to his home in California’s Bay Area — though, in a scene that reminded him of another Laurel and Hardy classic, “The Music Box,” the truck struggled to navigate his neighborhood’s steep hills.

He gradually began working his way through the collection, opening the canisters one by one, loading a reel onto a projector, and watching the long-dead come alive again. The more obscure silents — a Charlie Chase, a Lupino Lane — he might keep; the more obvious he would sell to another collector or maybe a customer on eBay.

When Mr. Mirsalis found a can labeled “Battle of the Century, R2,” he dismissed it as just another chopped-up version. “Ho hum, this isn’t going to be worth much,” he remembered thinking. Earlier this year, though, he threaded the reel into his projector, threw a switch and sent black-and-white specters dancing across a white wall.

As he took in the sight of Laurel and Hardy walking down a street, Mr. Mirsalis realized that something was not quite right. He had never seen this particular moment. Nor the one with a banana seller. Nor the lead-in to the pie fight — “What causes the pie fight,” he said.

His first, colorful response is best left to silent film. His second was, in retrospect, a little naïve, along the lines of: This is cool, but there are entire lost features in this collection.

Mr. Mirsalis had underestimated the Laurel-and-Hardy factor.

Few knew of his discovery until June, when Mr. Mirsalis delivered a talk at the annual “Mostly Lost” film workshop in Culpeper, Va., at which film experts and aficionados gather to help research and identify films in the Library of Congress’s collection.

While discussing his work with the Berkow Collection, Mr. Mirsalis mentioned that he had found all of the second reel of “The Battle of the Century.” He said the audience’s blown-away reaction signaled that even he hadn’t realized the significance of his find.

“I didn’t anticipate what the reaction would be,” he said. “Afterward, I was mobbed with people asking: ‘What are you going to do with it? What are you going to do?’ ” he recalled.

Plans are underway to restore and reunite both reels, which until now have been like Laurel without Hardy. And, perhaps in a year or so, we will see for the first time in nearly a century the pie fight to end all pie fights. Or, as Mr. Mirsalis put it:

“The pie fight, as intended.”