Alfred Goulding on AllMovie

A former vaudevillian, Alfred Goulding entered films in 1918 as a director of Hal Roach's Harold Lloyd pictures. Goulding was then assigned to a series starring circus clown Toto, but after only five 2-reelers, Toto quit. To fill out the series, Goulding recommended a talented fellow vaudevillian named Stan Laurel. Thus began a warm friendship between Goulding and Laurel that would endure until Stan's death in 1965. Leaving Roach in the early 1920s, Goulding directed a handful of children's films like Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood, then moved on to Roach's rival Mack Sennett, where he helmed such frivolities as 1928's The Campus Vamp and The Swim Princess. In the talkie era, he worked with the Columbia short-subject unit, then spent several years making programmers in England. He returned to the Roach fold in 1939 to direct the Laurel and Hardy feature A Chump at Oxford; reportedly, it was Goulding who convinced a recalcitrant Stan Laurel to do the film's now-famous "maze" scene. After WW II, he resettled in England, where he directed such Saturday-matinee fare as Dick Barton (1948) and The Adventures of Jane (1949). One of Alfred Goulding's lengthier assignments of the 1950s went uncredited; at the request of old pal Stan Laurel, Goulding directed Laurel & Hardy's benighted final feature, the French-filmed Atoll K (aka Utopia, 1951).