Utopia

The Spirit of ’89, all Française and no République, then they try a bit of the other.

In the face of withering criticism from numbskulls, Laurel and Hardy answer one and all with a masterpiece made in France (on that score cf. Nosseck’s Le Roi des Champs-Élysées).

Samuel Beckett’s Mercier et Camier was meant for them, and this is as close as we’ll get (cf. Foster’s Berth Marks). In every way a great work, their greatest film, maligned by those who drag a cherished image of “the boys” down corridors of mere nostalgia.

The Momus carries them to Mr. Laurel’s inherited South Seas isle. They are shipwrecked on a newly-born volcanic atoll. With them are a stateless man, a failed immigrant, and later a chanteuse fleeing her naval fiancé.

William Golding perhaps saw it and wrote Lord of the Flies (dir. Peter Brook), what with Alecto’s revolution.

The five articles of President Hardy’s constitution are:

No Passports

No Prisons

No Taxes

No Laws

No Money

The taxman’s hand reaches down into the frame to grab a glass of wine or a chop, the president and his cabinet are rescued on a floating gallows.

Also Mr. Laurel. “I don’t want to be the people!”

And Utopia is only the four-fifths rescension of Atoll K.