RESTORED LAUREL & HARDY SHORTS

In 2016 we showed 14 newly restored Laurel & Hardy short comedies and features, part of a major L&H library restoration project overseen by former film dealer Jeff Joseph. That work continues, and this week and next we screen the effort’s latest fruits: five more two- and three-reel comedies and arguably the duo’s funniest feature (see 6/3 at 4:15). The four shorts in this program, among the team’s very best, include: Clyde Bruckman’s The Battle of the Century (1927), a long, partly lost silent (now complete) with perhaps the screen’s greatest pie fight; James Parrott’s Brats (1930), in which Stan & Ollie play both adult fathers and their own children; Parrott’s Hog Wild (1930), in which the two try to install a rooftop antenna; and Parrott’s The Chimp (1932), in which Stan & Ollie take possession of a chimpanzee when a circus folds. DCP. Total 84 min.