"Without Your Love" (1937)

We go to 1937 for another comedy team, but unlike the Ritz Brothers, Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy seem to have no trouble making new fans!

Laurel & Hardy’s starring vehicles weren’t the type of movies to have popular songs shoehorned into them, so they don’t really appear on a lot of vintage sheet music, but this one from the Hal Roach/MGM feature “Pick a Star” is pretty neat!

The boys are barely in the movie and seemed to have been added to give a bit of a marketing push, although they're oddly not billed by name in the credits of the movie, but rather are just shown with their theme song playing!

They play versions of themselves as actors on a movie set and are extremely charming in a scene with Patsy Kelly.

The rest of the cast is also a lot of fun, sort of an all-star 1930s B-movie comedy cast!

As for the song, “Without Your Love” got a nice recording on Bluebird Records from Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm Orchestra with Bobby Goday on the vocal:

I know that Shep Fields was the type of bandleader that Benny Goodman was shoving out of the way, but I really like the whole “rippling rhythm” style. Buckets of period charm!