The opening titles of Angora Love assure the viewer that this will be "The dramatic story of a goat - a strong dramatic story." When Penelope the goat escapes from a pet store, the owner thinks she has been stolen. John McCabe quotes Stan Laurel at length in his 1966 biography, Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy; Stan recalled, "The picture really had no plot, just that goat - but we sure got a lot of footage out of him. I give a piece of cookie to the goat and he wants more so he follows us around. We try every conceivable way to get rid of him, but no use. We hid - we walked backward - we disguised ourselves. Nothing helped. We finally brought the goat to our room because the word had spread around that the goat had been stolen and we didn't want to be arrested as goatnappers. The comedy in our room consisted mainly of the goat eating the stuffing from the furniture and Babe's pants among other things. We gave it a bath, went to bed with it, had trouble with the landlord over it."
Typically, the comedy of Laurel and Hardy is in the details, so Stan's synopsis hardly does the film justice. A key detail is that the boys' landlord is played by Edgar Kennedy, long acknowledged as the Master of the Slow Burn. Since his bed is situated directly below the room in question, there are ample opportunities for him to be disturbed and go upstairs to confront the situation. Trying to manage a goat would be plenty noisy by itself, but at one point Stan decides to get up in the middle of the night to exercise. The short comes to a climax when Oliver notices a bad smell and instructs Stan to wash the goat. It doesn't take long before spilled water causes a leak which drips on Kennedy's face as he tries to sleep. The boys hope to cover their crime by splashing one another's heads in the wash bucket, even though the goat itself is in full view of the landlord. Needless to say, Stan, Ollie, the landlord, and a policeman (Harry Bernard) are all soaked before the final title card.
Following the team's entry into sound films, Angora Love was quickly remade as Laughing Gravy (1931). For the sound version, the goat became a cute pup with a curious name. In The Films of Laurel and Hardy, William K. Everson calls it "an exact re-working [which] repeats all of its best gags and extends its violence. Placing it all in a wintry setting, with much of the action taking place on the snow-covered roof in a howling storm, gives it a little more point and substance than the original, too. Everyone suffers spectacularly with the exception of the dog, Laughing Gravy, the cause of it all." Some of the gags and situations from Angora Love and from Laughing Gravy also found their way into their later three-reeler The Chimp (1932).
Producer: Hal Roach
Director: Lewis R. Foster
Screenplay: Leo McCarey (uncredited)
Cinematography: George Stevens
Film Editing: Richard C. Currier
Titles: H. M. Walker
Cast: Stan Laurel (Stan), Oliver Hardy (Ollie), Harry Bernard (Policeman), Charlie Hall (Neighbor), Edgar Kennedy (Landlord), Charley Young (Mr. Caribeau)
BW-20m.
by John M. Miller
