text: "Stick Around" is one of the brief series of films that paired Bobby Ray with Oliver 'Babe' Hardy before Hardy's immortal teaming with Stan Laurel. Several critics have suggested that Ray and Hardy -- the gormless little man and the overbearing big man -- were a prototype for Laurel and Hardy, but that simply isn't true. Ray and Hardy play off each other well, but really aren't a team; in each of these films, Ray has more footage and is clearly meant to be the hero, while Hardy bullies him in a manner very much unlike his later "Ollie" character's treatment of "Stanley". It's very clear that the relationship between little Bobby and big Babe was inspired by earlier Chaplin films, in which the Little Tramp was bullied by huge Mack Swain or burly Eric Campbell.<br /><br />However, in "Stick Around", Hardy sports a bowler hat that's identical to his later "Ollie" titfer (although with a fuller moustache), and he and Bobby -- after spending most of this movie as adversaries -- end up as drunken comrades.<br /><br />Bobby is a paperhanger for the firm of Matz and Blatz, with Hardy as his boss. When the tardy Bobby tries to pretend he showed up promptly, there's some clever physical business between the two men that reminds me of a routine performed by Roscoe Arbuckle and Buster Keaton in 'The Garage'. A bit later, Bobby Ray -- whose brief acting career never firmly developed a screen persona -- performs an "impossible" gag that would have been inappropriate for Stan Laurel, when he pulls a long stepladder out of a much smaller toolkit.<br /><br />The paperhangers go to work in a sanitarium, and there are the usual unrealistic depictions of mental illness: one resident insists on sitting on a piece of toast because he thinks he's a poached egg! There are also some howlingly racist (and tastelessly unfunny) gags involving a black man who obligingly lets the inmates crack open walnuts on top of his head. When he sees a *picture* of a lion -- not even a photograph, mind you -- he goes all cowardly as if it were an actual wild animal.<br /><br />"Stick Around" is fairly dire. Most of the pantomime and acting is much broader than it needs to be for a slapstick comedy; even Hardy, already a very subtle actor by 1925, pongs badly with his over-acting here. There are several bad examples of shot-matching. I was impressed with one unusual camera set-up, when a fat pedestrian's face is dirtied and we see a close-up of his reflection in a hand mirror, rather than his actual face.<br /><br />SPOILERS COMING. During their brief pairing, Hardy typically played Ray's boss or adversary or both; here, for once, they end up as pals. It's a nice ending, but it doesn't make up for what's really a poor film. My rating for this one is only 4 out of 10.