Rating: B
Dir: Gus Meins, Charley Rogers
Star: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charlotte Henry, Henry Brandon
a.k.a. March of the Wooden Soldiers
Despite taking place in July, this has become something of a Christmas staple on television in America, mostly under its alternate title. It’s a bit surprising, because it’s almost aggressively surreal. I wouldn’t normally suggest watching “tampered” versions of movies, yet the colourized edition of this certainly enhances the bizarre nature of the experience: five minutes in, and it felt like I was tripping balls. The film is based on a 1903 operetta, composed by Victor Herbert with a libretto by Glen MacDonough, designed to follow up on the success of a similar Wizard of Oz adaptation. It hurled characters from every nursery rhyme you can think of into its plot, and proved a hit.
The rights for a movie adaptation were originally sold to RKO in 1930, but plans for a Technicolor version were scrapped (so watching a colourized version arguably reflects original intent). Hal Roach picked up the project four years later, largely as a vehicle for star double-act Laurel and Hardy, then near the peak of their fame. It was the first of three movie versions, and at least five made for TV. The most famous of the latter is the 1986 one starring Drew Barrymore in her drug abuse years, Keanu Reeves and Pat Morita. Odd as the casting there sounds, it’s utterly bland by comparison, and absolutely can’t match this for overall weirdness. We hit the ground here running, after a story-book style opening introduces us to the characters, while Mother Goose warbles Toyland, one of the operetta’s most famous tunes.
We then explode into the setting, and what a… um, unique location it is. A nursery rhyme tends to hardly make coherent sense on its own. Cram literal depictions of dozens of them together and it should be no surprise the results are illogical, and feel like a nightmarish dream, resulting from consuming too much pizza, laced with extra LSD. Houses shaped like boots rub shoulders with a trio of pig-like humans – or are they human-like pigs? A reject from the cast of Cats chases a real monkey. But it’s a primate dressed to resemble a primitive version of Mickey Mouse [Roach and Walt Disney were friends, so this appears authorized]. There’s an infant stuck up a tree, because… Oh, shit, “Rock-a-bye Baby”. I’d forgotten that one.
We haven’t seen a semblance of plot, let alone Laurel and Hardy, and I already feel thoroughly disconnected from reality. The core story has Bo-Peep (Henry), daughter of the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, fending off unwelcome advances from the film’s sole original character, super-creepy old guy Silas Barnaby (Brandon). Two things stand out about him. Despite the goy name, I must say, in some ways Silas looks like a stereotypical Jew. This being before people were sensitive about… /handwaves in the direction of trouble brewing in Germany at the time. I’m not the only one to see it, though I don’t care much. Secondly, Brandon was just 22 when the film came out. It’s very well-done aging in performance and make-up. He reportedly got the part after Roach saw him play an old lawyer on stage, and the producer couldn’t believe it when a young man showed up at his office.
Unfortunately, Barnaby redefines “predatory lender”, since he owns the mortgage on the shoe – not a sentence I expected to write when I woke up today. If Bo-Peep won’t agree to marry him, he’ll foreclose on the debt. Mrs. Old Woman can’t afford to pay it off, so she and her daughter will be out on the street. When her lodgers Stannie Dum (Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Hardy) hear this, they vow to help. However, a plan to ask their employer, the Toymaker, for money goes unexecuted. They are instead fired due to mixing up an order from Santa: 600 one-foot toy soldiers became 100 six-foot soldiers. An attempt to burgle Barnaby’s house and steal the mortgage is no more successful.
Meanwhile, Bo-Peep has found true love with Tom-Tom (Felix Knight), the piper’s son. I’d always thought his name was just Tom, repeated for emphasis in the rhyme. Apparently not. However, this did let me make a GPS joke [Kids! Ask your parents] With his tweezed eyebrows and incessant warbling, he set a bar as annoying romantic interest, not surpassed for thirty years, until Freddy Eynsford-Hill. Further shenanigans ensue, including Barnaby getting hitched to Stannie, while Tom-Tom is falsely accused of pignapping – he does have a documented criminal record in this area, to be fair – and is exiled to Bogeyland. Stannie and Ollie reveal Barnaby’s schemes, and the villain is forced to flee, only to return with an army of Bogeymen. But remember those 100 six-foot soldiers? The alternate title finally proves justified.
The overall effect is as close to traditional British panto as I’ve seen on film. The theatrical origin and fairy story basis resonate most obviously to that effect. However, the mix of slapstick and cheesy comedy, songs, plus romance and melodrama, with larger than life characters, will be familiar to anyone who has ever yelled “He’s behind you!” at a former soap-opera star. But elements of the execution now feel unexpectedly dark. The Three Little Pigs, for example. Their masks have a creepy, fixed expression – they literally had different heads for “happy” and “sad”. This leaves them looking like they’re about to go home invade someone. Doesn’t help that on the wall are portraits of their parents: Mum is a plate of sausages, and Dad’s a football. [One pig is played by Angelo Rositto who, fifty years later, would be The Master in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. Another would go on to be porn director Zebedy Colt]
I think the knockoff version of Mickey Mouse is the most disturbing element. Many reviews speak of the Bogeymen being a source of childhood terrors. But to a contemporary viewer, they’re what you get when you order Where the Wild Things Are on Temu. Watching a trained monkey dressed as Steamboat Willie, operating an airship and dropping fireworks on the Bogeymen… Yeah, what has been seen cannot be unseen. Maybe it seemed charming at the time. Or maybe this kind of thing explains why the film received midnight screenings on its initial release, presumably targeted more at the Reefer Madness crowd than a family audience.
Remarkably, the darkness is significantly toned-down compared to the stage version from thirty years earlier (which also had a lot more songs). In it, the Toymaker is a villain too, who according to Wikipedia, “plots with Barnaby to create toys that kill and maim. The demonically possessed dolls turn on the Toymaker, killing him.” Where’s Charles Band when you need him? Later, Barnaby drinks poisoned wine meant for the romantic lead and dies as well. Subsequent revivals softened this payback. Here, he’s last seen hiding in a house of building blocks which collapse, spelling out R-A-T. Dead? Who knows. The Hays Code had come fully in effect a few months before this was released, severely limiting what could be shown on screen.
Despite, or perhaps because of, this tonal whiplash, I still found this very entertaining – Tom-Tom aside, anyway. A lot of effort clearly went into the production, which is a visual treat, and the pantomime ethos is in my wheelhouse too. Shame the Old Woman wasn’t a washed-up sitcom actor in drag though. Laurel and Hardy’s comedy, albeit more toward the “blunt object” end of the spectrum, is often genuinely very funny. You can see their influence on other double-acts down the years, from Abbott and Costello through Morecambe and Wise, to Harold and Kumar. Stan and Laurel are the engine which keeps the film going, and other elements merely provide bonus amusement. While the end result may have been intended as “family entertainment”, it kept my attention far better than most modern entries in that genre.