Atoll K (1951) - film review

With Ollie acting as his financial representative, Stan visits a London law firm to collect a substantial inheritance left to him by his uncle.  Unfortunately, almost all of the money Stan inherits is eaten up by taxes and legal fees and so all he is left with is a rickety old yacht and a small island in the South Pacific.  Just before they set out from Marseilles, Stan and Ollie pick up a stateless refugee, who gladly cooks their meals, and an Italian stowaway, who helps himself to their food.   Before they reach their destination, the boys are caught up in a violent sea storm and are shipwrecked on a deserted atoll, which they christen Crusoeland.  Just when they begin to miss female company, an attractive French cabaret singer named Chérie Lamour lands on the island, seeking a refuge from the fiancé she has just fallen out with.  When uranium deposits are discovered on the island, it attracts visitors from around the world, each nationality wanting to claim the island as its own.  Ollie declares the island an independent republic, with himself the president and Stan ’the people’.  It isn’t long before the island paradise is reduced to a squabbling melee and in the ensuing revolution Ollie is deposed and sentenced to death with his friends.  Could this be the end for Stan and Ollie...?

Laurel and Hardy’s swansong has been pretty comprehensively maligned over the years and yet, if you compare it with the anodyne offerings they made for MGM and 20th Century Fox a few years previously, it actually stands as one of their better late films, a return to the anarchic fun of their great 1930s comedies.   The fact that the film is currently only available in poor quality transfers from degraded prints does little for its reputation, but if you can make allowance for this, Atoll K, a.k.a. Utopia, a.k.a. Robinson Crusoeland isn’t nearly as bad as its reputation would suggest.  Admittedly, the visual gags are somewhat laboured and lack the finesse of earlier L&H films (although some are inspired), and the political satire is pretty strained, but it is a joy to see Stan and Ollie released from the tedious bourgeois straitjacket to which Hollywood executives and screenwriters confined them in the 1940s.  And the film ends with one of the best gags of any of their films, albeit one of a distinctly black hue (one to get your teeth into, ahem).  How many other films do you know make fun of bouillabaisse?

Atoll K was a French-Italian co-production which came about as a result of the resurgence in popularity of Laurel and Hardy in Europe after the Second World War.   However, whilst the film had a healthy budget for its time (far in excess of what L&H had to work with in their Hal Roach days), it was soon mired in production difficulties which caused its shooting schedule to slip from twelve weeks to a full year.   The main problem was one of communication between the multi-national cast, which included the French diva Suzy Delair (lacking her usual sparkle and atrociously dubbed), and French director Léo Joannon, who seemed to be under the misapprehension he was making an art film.  Hollywood blacklisted director John Berry was brought on board discretely to assist Joannon, but this did not prevent the film’s production from getting hopelessly out of control.  There were squabbles over the plot, which led Stan Laurel to bring in Alfred Goulding and Monty Collins to redraft the script.  And to cap it all, both of the film’s two stars had serious health problems, which caused the biggest production hold-ups.  Stan Laurel was suffering from dysentery and a prostate ulcer, which made it impossible for him to work for more than 30 minutes at a time, whilst Oliver Hardy was chronically overweight and coping with a life-threatening heart condition.  Stan and Ollie’s poor state of health is more than apparent in the film, particularly Stan, who is so emaciated and lacking in his former vitality that you feel guilty laughing at him.  It was a small miracle that the film was ever completed, when everything seemed to be against it. 

Four versions of the film were released, but wherever it was shown it attracted poor reviews and failed to make any money.  This is a shame, as Atoll K was a timely satire on the kind of futile territorial disputes and blinkered capitalism that were becoming endemic half a decade on from the end of WWII, a poignant reminder of the elusiveness of Utopia in our troubled world.  Audiences were perhaps expecting something less subtle, a rehash of the harmless slapstick of the 1930s.  To be fair, Laurel and Hardy deserve some credit for departing from their usual routine and trying something a little more daring.  If anything the film is probably more relevant today (and therefore more enjoyable) than it was when it was first screened.  No one could mistake Atoll K for a comic masterpiece, but it is an engaging piece, despite its many, all too obvious deficiencies, and a reasonably satisfying parting shot from the greatest comedy double act of all time.  Another nice mess just about sums it up.

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