Jan 3, 2024

March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934)

Saw March of the Wooden Soldiers (1934), a mostly light-hearted slapstick film starring Laurel and Hardy.  The plot is silly and episodic.  Mostly it revolves around the evil Silas Barnaby scheming to marry Miss Bo Peep, despite the fact the Bo Peep is in love with Tom-Tom the piper's son.  Laurel and Hardy spend the film frustrating and ruining Silas's plans and generally failing at this, getting injured in some cartoon way in the process.

The film is very old and somewhat pokey.  It has a few sort of chapters which are not closely related to each other but which present new schemes of Silas's.  The film also has a very tame and almost cloying sensibility, with men in makeup and tights singing earnestly about running off to get married and live in a castle.  It's fairly quaint in a kind of dated way.  It comes off as a little slow to modern sensibilities.

It also comes off as sort of racist to modern sensibilities.  It's not over-the-top in the way that old war-time cartoon are, but it's a product of its time and its time was fairly racist.  Examples: The antagonist Silas Barnaby seems to be a miser and a money lender.  He is identified as a rat a few times which was an anti-semitic trope of the time.  He also seems to be in league(?) with the evil boogeymen who are dark-skinned, grass-skirt-wearing men who cavort and jump about but who are eventually subdued by the titanium-white-skinned wooden soldiers.  It's a little weird, but it's not the main focus of the film.  Mostly we see Laurel and Hardy joking around, but there's that element in it.

There's also a monkey in a Micky Mouse costume which is ghastly and extremely hilarious to my blackened heart.

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