The climatic pie fight from “Battle of the Century,” with Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy in the middle of the action. Hal Roach Studios.
“The Battle of the Century,” Laurel and Hardy’s 1927 silent short film, famed for its epic pie-in-the-face fight sequence, quickly disappeared after its theatrical release.
The 20-minute, two-reel bit of comic relief in the latter days of the Roaring Twenties got left behind in the rush to talkies, as did most silent films. The last known surviving copy of its famed second reel was considered lost for good by the 1960s. It seemed to be a flickering bit of entertainment lost to time, disintegrating film stock and a too-late appreciation of an outdated art form. Slate magazine once described the missing second reel, containing most of the pie-fight sequence, as “one of the most deeply mourned lost treasures in film history.”