The Battle of the Century is a 1927 short film (20 minutes) directed by Clyde Bruckman, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
This film starts out with a boxing sequence in which Stan is an utterly hopeless boxer, and Ollie is his beleaguered coach. After Stan predictably loses his fight, the two boys are out and about when an insurance salesman offers to sell them a policy. Ollie gets the bright idea to maim Stan to collect on the money, which he does by trying to get Stan to slip on a banana peel. That goes wrong, firstly when a cop slips on Ollie's banana peel. Secondly, a pastry chef carrying a load of pies slips on the banana peel as he's exiting his shop. This triggers what the film is famous for, namely, the biggest pie fight in movie history. Estimates vary, but by the time the movie ends something like a hundred extras have thrown at least three thousand pies.
For decades, the only known footage of this film was some clips from the pie fight. In 1979 the first reel (the boxing match) was discovered, and in 2015 the second reel was discovered, making the film almost, but not quite, complete.
In 2020, this film was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress for National Film Registry.
Tropes:
- Banana Peel: Ollie's devious plan to drop a banana peel in front of Stan, hopefully causing him to slip and fall and allowing them to collect the insurance. Stan shows a supernatural ability to avoid stepping on the banana peel, but first a cop and then a pastry chef slip on the peel, the latter triggering the pie fight.
- The Boxing Episode: The first half of this movie, as poor Stan goes up against a hulking brute of a champion, only to nearly win through dumb luck before he's finally knocked out.
- Comedic Sociopathy: Ollie trying to get his poor dimwitted buddy Stan injured so they can collect on insurance.
- Cranial Eruption: This trope, usually found in animation, happens here when the cop raps Stan on the head with a baton after slipping on the banana peel. Stan takes off his bowler to reveal a pronounced lump on the back of his head.
- Escalating War: The pastry chef hits Ollie in the face with a pie. Ollie throws a pie at the pastry chef but misses and instead hits a lady across the street in the butt. The woman throws a pie at Stan but misses and hits another man, who throws a pie back...and so on and so on until the most epic pie fight in movie history closes the film.
- Fat Idiot: Ollie is smarter than Stan, but not that much smarter.Ollie: If we win we get $100—if we lose we get $5—that's a difference of $1500.
- Food Fight: The film ends with the biggest pie fight in history. By Stan Laurel's estimate, four thousand pies were used.
- High-Class Glass
- A typical fancy guy in a High-Class Glass and tuxedo wanders into the growing pie fight, attempts to stop it, and is splattered by pies.
- A variation on this trope when a rich lady being driven around pulls out a lorgnette (that is, eyeglasses on a stick) to view the pie fight. After she is hit in the face by a pie she tells her chauffeur "Home, James."
- Implausible Deniability: At the end, the cop shows up and demands to know if Stan and Ollie started the pie fight. Ollie, who is covered in pie, says "What pie fight?". Cut to the apocalyptic pie fight in which a whole city block worth of people are flinging pies. Cut back to Stan and Ollie, who run away from the cop as the film ends.
- Insurance Fraud: Ollie attempts to commit this by dropping a Banana Peel at Stan's feet after getting Stan an insurance policy. Things go awry.
- Logo Joke: One of many L&H films for MGM where the closing title card replaced Leo the Lion with a cute lion cub.
- Missing Episode: Although by 2015 most of this film had been recovered, the sequence where the insurance salesman (played by Eugene Palette) sells the dynamic duo a policy is still missing. In the restored version of the film this scene is represented by still pictures and some longer-than-usual titles. Ollie manages to splatter himself with ink from a fountain pen.
- Pie in the Face: Probably the Trope Codifier of Pie in the Face and the biggest pie fight ever recorded on film.
- Retraux: The missing scene where Stan and Ollie buy the insurance policy is shown in the restored film with title cards, which are obviously latter-day additions but are done in the same typeface and with the same grainy film to match the look of the rest of the movie.
- Ripped from the Headlines: The boxing scene has a sequence where Stan quite accidentally knocks his opponent out with a punch, but does not win the fight, because he is too dumb to retreat to a neutral corner so the referee can begin his count. This was obviously inspired by the infamous "Long Count Fight
", which happened barely two weeks before production started on this film. In that fight Gene Tunney (apparently) escaped being knocked out when Jack Dempsey was slow to retreat to a neutral corner, giving Tunney some thirteen seconds to get up after Dempsey floored him. - Shot in the Ass: Or hit with a pie in the ass. One of the first victims of the pie fight is a fashionable young woman who is hit by Ollie's pie right on her shapely bottom.
- Two-Act Structure: Basically two unconnected stories, with Stan as a boxer in the first half, and our heroes getting into a truly massive pie fight in the second half.
- Undercrank: Used in the scene where the barber is hit by a pie and falls butt-first into a trash can. He flips over and skitters around on his hands and feet like a crab, the scene obviously sped up.
- Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: The pastry shop is called "Ye Olde Pie Shoppe."
