Universally they've regarded them not just as unfunny, but downright depressing experiences, traumatic even. Subsequent books on the team have been merciless about the Fox films. In later years, Stan especially was quite ashamed of these Fox films and perhaps felt guilty that he so easily had acceded to the company's demands by all accounts he didn't put up much of a fight. Yanked into reality Laurel and Hardy aged ten years overnight and instead of loveable innocents merely looked like foolish old men.
The careful clown-like white make-up and flat lighting that had enhanced Laurel and Hardy's personae as childlike adults, babes in the woods living in a hostile world, was abandoned. Their very appearance, regarded as "old-fashioned" even back then, was esthetically updated to conform with the brassy, slick look of other 1940s comedies. But not only did this freedom evaporate overnight with Stan and Babe (as Hardy was affectionately known off-camera) told where to stand and deliver their lines like every other actor-for-hire and otherwise shut out of the creative process, but the studio went even further. But Fox was one of the top three studios in town and they naively assumed they'd be allowed the same creative freedom they had always enjoyed. Roach was a rinky-dink studio that made few films by 1940, all lower-budget programmers. When the team signed with Fox they thought they were moving up in the world. At Roach Stan, who was really the creative force behind the team, had been their director in all but name, had acted more or less as chief gag writer and, perhaps most importantly, had cut all their movies. For decades all of Laurel and Hardy's post-1940 movies - that is, everything they appeared in after ending their long association with Hal Roach Studios - have for decades been regarded as worse than bad.
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