by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a movie last night: the 1934 version
of Victor Herbert’s opera Babes in Toyland,
retitled March of the Wooden Soldiers in its early-1960’s TV release to avoid confusion with the Walt Disney
remake from 1962 (which I haven’t seen since it was new and my age was still in
single digits, though what little I remember of it — mainly the scenes with the
laser cannon — indicates it was a really silly movie distinguished only by the
presence of Ray Bolger in the cast). This was a Hal Roach production featuring
Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy as “Stannie Dum” and “Ollie Dee,” respectively,
silly character names but ones which at least allowed them to address each
other as “Stan” and “Ollie,” as usual as they fit into (and expanded) the usual
comic-relief roles in a turn-of-the-(last)-century operetta. It was also quite
handsomely produced — obviously Roach was out to prove to the rest of Hollywood
that he could do a lavish production with quite elaborate and beautiful sets,
and hundreds of extras, instead of just cheap (but enduringly funny) little
slapstick shorts. The edition we were watching was a 77-minute release from MGM
Home Video in 2008 that restored a beautiful scene in which the romantic leads,
Tom-Tom (Felix Knight) and Bo-Peep (Charlotte Henry, a year after her stunning
performance as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the 1933 Paramount version of Alice
in Wonderland), sing a duet in the forest
to which they’ve been exiled and ghostly visions of the Sandman and his fairies
sprinkle dust in their direction to lull them off to dreamland. What’s most
fascinating about Babes in Toyland
is how strongly it anticipates The Wizard of Oz, an MGM production from five years later, from the
opening establishing shot of Toyland (even though the crane shot at the very
start, through which we approach Mother Goose [Virginia Karns] as she sings the
famous “Toyland” song, is surprisingly jerky for a 1934 film) to the scenes in
the forest, where Our Hero and Heroine are menaced by the monstrous Bogeymen
(who look like they were hired to be native villains in the serial The
Lost City and made it to the wrong
soundstage by mistake).
The plot isn’t much: Old Widow Peep (Florence Roberts),
Bo-Peep’s mother, lives (like the original Old Mother Hubbard) in a giant shoe
that’s about to be foreclosed on by the bad guy, Silas Barnaby (played by a
German refugee actor named Harry Kleinbach, who later changed his name to Henry
Brandon). Stannie and Ollie work in the factory of the Toymaker (William
Burress) and hope to get enough of an advance on their salaries to pay off
Widow Peep’s mortgage, but instead they get themselves fired because they
screwed up an order from Santa Claus (Ferdinand Munier), who wanted 600 toy
soldiers, each one foot tall, and instead they built 100 toy soldiers, each six
feet tall. The bad guy says he’ll forget about the mortgage if Bo-Peep marries
him — and, not wanting to let her mom become homeless, she says yes. Instead,
to spare Bo-Peep the Fate Worse Than Death, the good guys play a trick on him
and marry him to a heavily veiled Stannie in drag — a joke that no doubt plays
quite differently in today’s age of same-sex marriage than it did in 1934!
Barnaby responds by kidnapping one of the Three Little Pigs (who are drawn as
typically stereotyped movie Blacks, though since their roles are mute this
isn’t as offensive as it would have been if they’d spoken) and framing Tom-Tom
for the pig’s murder, and when the pig is found alive in Barnaby’s cellar (but
not soon enough to save Tom-Tom from exile to Bogeyland, where Bo-Peep joins
him) Barnaby decides to get his revenge by mobilizing the Bogeys for an all-out
assault on Toyland.
What’s fascinating about this film is it isn’t the light,
fey children’s fantasy we’d expect from the opening reel, but a surprisingly
dark movie — like the Winged Monkeys in The Wizard of Oz, the Bogeys come off as a genuinely frightening
menace, and parts of Babes in Toyland are scary enough to qualify as horror — one wonders if Harry
Kleinbach’s real-life experiences of Nazi persecution informed the film’s
portrayal of the Bogeys’ march on Toyland, which anticipates all the scenes of
Nazis marching into innocent villages we got during World War II-era movies.
The Victor Herbert songs are genuinely lovely (especially the sleep duet, which
for some reason was cut from the film for years and only restored for this
version) and Felix Knight’s high tenor and Charlotte Henry’s serviceable
soprano are good voices for them. Henry is also quite winsome in her role;
apparently Hollywood was hoping she’d be the next Mary Pickford — an adult
actress who could credibly play children — only that got short-circuited by the
spectacular mega-success of Shirley Temple, a real child who was just as precocious as Pickford or
Henry. Kleinbach’s reading of the villain is weird, speaking not in the Snidely
Whiplash voice we expect but in a rather odd cross between George Arliss and
Boris Karloff, and though there were times during the movie I wished Roach had
got Karloff for the role (they’d worked together before in the 1931
French-language version of Laurel and Hardy’s Pardon Us, now alas lost) he’s certainly credible as a figure
of menace. Babes in Toyland is a
quite sophisticated movie given its provenance in an operetta for kids, and
between the horrific darkness of the Bogeyland scenes and the surprisingly
frank gags about Stannie’s marriage to Barnaby, it’s a wonder how this film,
released in December 1934, got past the Production Code Administration and got
awarded Code Certificate #401 (prominently displayed in the opening credits
along with the National Recovery Administration emblem!).
