A Fine Mess
Artist
Al Hirschfeld
United States, 1903 - 2003
Date1975
Dimensions44.75 x 30: 45 3/4 x 30 in. (116.2 x 76.2 cm)
ClassificationsPoster
Credit LineGift of Diane Lippert
Object numberPH.812
DescriptionThis poster represents a collaboration between Richard J. Anobile and Al Hirschfeld, who designed the promotional poster and the cover art of a book comprising film stills and quotations, this time from the great comic film team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Hirschfeld’s caricatures of the two men, which appeared on both poster and book cover, brilliantly capture their on-screen personas. In the more than one hundred comedy films they made together between 1921 and 1950, Oliver Hardy, the heavy-set figure on the left, is characteristically pompous and punctilious, while Stan Laurel, the “thin one,” plays his foil, a bumbling simpleton. Together they manage to turn ordinary, everyday situations into disaster, typically leading Hardy to utter his catchphrase: “Here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into, Stanley.” The title of the book advertised here reflects the fact that the phrase is often misquoted as “another fine mess.” The pair made a film of that name in 1930, a few years after they began working for the producer Hal Roach at Roach Studios. The quotation in the poster, “I’m Mr. Hardy. This is my friend, Mr. Laurel,” was the phrase with which the fastidious Hardy tended to greet people, before the blundering pair introduced inescapable chaos to their lives. On View
Not on view
