When Harold Met Hal

Harold Eugene “Hal (or sometimes Harry)” Roach was born in Elmira, New York, in 1892.

As a boy, Hal admired the local celebrity Mark Twain, and at the age of seventeen he lit out for the territories.

After prospecting in Alaska, Roach moved south. In 1912 he was working as a trucking supervisor in Los Angeles when he saw an advertisement for cowboys to appear in a motion picture.

Roach had the clothes, the riding skills, and, it turned out, more knowledge of how a roulette wheel worked than the Bison Studio’s director. A role as a croupier and the prospect of daily pay turned him into a movie actor.

Hustling for bit parts, Roach crossed paths with Harold Lloyd (1893–1971). This young actor had found work with the stock company of Oliver Morosco, producer of L. Frank Baum’s Tik-Tok Man of Oz—but he kept away from that musical play, not wanting to become a “chorus man.” Needing more work to keep himself fed, Lloyd tried motion pictures.

Soon Roach was in the orbit of the action star J. Warren Kerrigan. Lloyd was doing a lot of work for the director J. Farrell MacDonald. When MacDonald directed Kerrigan in Samson (released in spring 1914), Roach and Lloyd both appeared in the movie under Biblical beards.

The new Oz Film Manufacturing Company hired MacDonald to direct The Patchwork Girl of Oz and other adaptations of Baum’s fairy tales. In his 1928 autobiography, An American Comedy, Lloyd wrote: “I found Roach working here and he and I clowned as Hottentots and similar savages in breechclouts and bolomania, a heavy but easily removed body paint.”

Baum actually called his characters Tottenhots, basing them on the hoary European idea of the Hottentot but also giving them their own voice and moving slightly past that stereotype. As I pointed out in my article “The Troublesome Tottenhots,” published in the spring 2013 Baum Bugle, the Oz Film Manufacturing Company showed a Tottenhot serving on a jury in the Emerald City at a time when African-Americans were excluded from juries in a large part of their country.

Reference books from the 1970s onward say “Al Roach” performed the role of the Cowardly Lion in some of those early Oz films. That rendering of Hal Roach’s name appears in Einar Lauritzen and Gunnar Lundquist’s American Film-Index 1908–1915, a seminal reference book published in 1976, but I don’t see signs of a lion there. The costume’s mask makes it impossible to confirm who’s inside. Any early-20th-century source for this credit is welcome.

TOMORROW: The big idea.