FANTASIA OBSCURA: Is This Festive Favorite from Laurel & Hardy as Innocent as it First Seems?
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, though, you really have to make sure those toys you’re about to give out are safe for children to play with…
Babes in Toyland (aka March of the Wooden Soldiers) (1934)
Distributed by: MGM
Directed by: Gus Meins and Charles Rogers
Whoever said, “It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt,” probably never heard of Laurel & Hardy. For these two comedy legends, getting hurt was not only funny in and of itself, it was the whole point. Their shtick depended on watching a fool and ne’er do well get themselves into deeper trouble with every step, which often included malapropisms, tie-twiddling, cries of surprise, and a few bars of “The Dance of the Cuckoos” along with all the chaos and destruction around them.
They were so iconic, in fact, that when given a chance to work in a musical, the material tried to accommodate them, as opposed to the other way around…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcfGmolIi1Q
Using an operetta from 1903 with major pedigree as a jumping off point, our story is set in Toyland, as introduced to us in song (“Toyland”) by Mother Goose (Virginia Karns in her last role). We get introduced as she sings the theme to Little Bo Peep (Charlotte Henry), her mother the Widow Peep (Florence Roberts) who happens to live in a shoe with way too many kids, Tom-Tom the Piper’s Son (Felix Knight in his first credited role), and the crooked Bartelby (Henry Brandon, his first credited role though under the name “Henry Kleinbach”), whose all angles and likely to have walked a crooked mile.
We also meet Dee and Dum; not Tweedle Dee, but “Ollie Dee,” along with “Stanley Dum.” Three guesses who got those roles…
The two boys, who live at the Ol’ Peep Shoe with Bo and her ma, work for the Toy Maker (an uncredited William Burress). We watch them on the job as they cause mayhem and screw up a work order from Santa (an uncredited Ferdinand Munier); instead of having ready for Herr Kringle 600 one-foot tall soldiers, they have instead 100 six-foot tall soldiers, which gets the boys fired.
Which is really bad luck, as Bartleby has some serious lecherous hots for Bo Peep, and is willing to call in the mortgage he has on the shoe, throwing Bo and all her Peeps into the street. Without their jobs, the boys are about to watch things get very bad for our blonde innocent at the hands of the foul fiend.
Faster than you can say #MeToo, the Dee and Dum boys hatch, execute, and fail spectacularly in a series of plans to save Bo, to allow her to keep out of his clutches and marry Tom-Tom instead. But with every success built upon a failure, Bartleby comes back to cause more damage.
Some of this damage is libelous to a whole group, whether intentionally or not. As portrayed by Brandon, his villain with his exaggerated facial features, being an obvious outsider from the community as a whole, and willingness to use financial assets to ruin others, suggests many of the more unsavory suppositions about Jews that “polite people” wouldn’t seriously discuss aloud. (This film came out a good 13 years before Gentleman’s Agreement would be released, after all.) The fact that Bartleby’s henchman wears what looks like a kippah and has a prominent nose doesn’t allow the casual viewer to ignore the dog whistles and assume that the villain was just another banker or landlord, which made up many villains on film at the time during the start of the Depression.
It doesn’t help much that Bartleby ends up going to Bogeyland, where he not only encounters the Bogeymen, he takes a leadership role among them. And here we have more problems, as the Bogeymen are savages from a dark land who are all dark in color, wearing full-body dark furry robes, thankfully, as opposed to being cast with (shall we say) particular actors in mind. The longer one takes to think about the messages possibly being sent by the film, in talking about savages being led by a rich manipulator who’s not one of us, the less you find to laugh at in the movie…
Was this intentional? The fact that most reviews from the time discussed the film as being fun for children and family entertainment suggests that such attitudes were so prevalent then, that they just didn’t register with anyone the way they would years later, when folks became more sensitive to what they were seeing. The fact that people thought that scary monsters invading in the middle of the night threatening to take children away was something perfectly fine for kids, as opposed to something that is one of the many unfinished projects from Guillermo del Toro, gives you some sense of just how desensitized our fore bearers were…
About the only folks who might have taken umbrage with anything in the film back then were some of the people who saw the mouse (a monkey in a costume) that hung out with the Cat with the Fiddle (Pete Gordon, also in costume):
Those folks, the holders of the mouse’s presumed IP, probably vowed that this would be the last time anything of theirs would ever show up without their say-so. About the only retaliatory act we’re aware of for this is Disney’s own Babes in Toyland from 1961, trying to erase memories of this film from audiences’ minds.
Not that they needed have bothered; while the film got good notices on release, it ended up being a money-loser for the producers. The film would over time get re-released with different titles, to try and sneak up on viewers; it was under the title March of the Wooden Soldiers (placed on the movie in 1950) that the film would find its audience as a holiday offering on Tribune Broadcasting-owned television stations in the 1960s.
Which made the film popular to new generations, who in later years if they caught it on television without enough eggnog drunk to dull their senses might have noticed a few problems with what they were seeing.
Adding to their family traditions for the season figuring out how to get out of another fine mess they’d gotten themselves into…
NEXT TIME: If you really believe that the holidays are just not complete without watching Die Hard, then have we got a classic for you!
