Dogs of War! (Hal Roach Studios, Pathé Exchange, 1923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 27) Turner Classic Movies showed a program of films that were about the movie business, including a 2023 quirk-fest called Film Geek about a movie-mad kid in New York City and his relationship with his father; and Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), in which a movie character steps off the screen of his film and ends up in real life (a neat reversal of Buster Keaton’s 1924 comedy masterpiece, Sherlock, Jr., in which Keaton played a movie projectionist who dreamed his way into the film he was showing). They closed out the night with a quite quirky short called Dogs of War! (1923), one of Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” a.k.a. “Little Rascals” comedies. “Our Gang” was a series Roach launched in 1921 when he auditioned a child actress for a film with adults. Roach was put off by the overly made-up appearance of the girl and the stage-bound nature of her acting – both had been decided on by her parents – and when he walked out on the audition he saw a bunch of kids playing in the streets and behaving naturalistically. Roach also wanted to build a comedy series around Black comic boy actor Ernest “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison, and the “Our Gang” films, including this one, frequently featured Black and white children playing together as equals. There are at least two Black child performers in Dogs of War!, Morrison and Allen “Farina” Hoskins, who was popular enough in the Black community that Duke Ellington wrote one of his first records, “L’il Farina,” about him. The first reel of Dogs of War! consists of the children fighting a war with each other, using weird weapons like a periscope made from old chimney pipes, artillery similarly repurposed from old drainpipes, and a preposterous comic tank that doesn’t look that different (as my husband Charles pointed out) from the real primitive tanks used in World War I.

This part is O.K. but the second half is considerably funnier: Farina’s mother (whom we don’t see) has found him a job in the movies at $5 per day. (The studio is the fictitious “West Coast Studios,” really Hal Roach’s lot.) The other kids naturally decide they want some of that movie money for themselves, and they determine to crash “West Coast Studios” and see if they can get hired. After being turned away by the studio gateman (which became a staple scene in movies about Hollywood for the next several decades), they sneak in by disguising themselves as non-living dummies. The best scene in Dogs of War! is one in which the “Gang” are chased down a long studio hallway both with doors that genuinely open and doors that don’t. They achieve the same almost balletic precision the Marx Brothers would achieve when they did scenes like this about a decade later. The kids also run into Harold Lloyd, making an early star cameo with his then on-screen co-star Jobyna Ralston as the kids run into him while he’s shooting his film Why Worry? (1923). Also on screen is Why Worry?’s co-director, Fred C. Newmeyer, who ironically had filmed the first Our Gang short but Roach hadn’t liked his work and replaced him with Robert McGowan, who directed Dogs of War! as well. McGowan deserves a lot of credit for getting the “Our Gang” kids to do such great precision slapstick. Dogs of War! ends with the gang grabbing hold of a movie camera and trying their hands at filmmaking themselves – only they don’t realize that their camera had previously been used to shoot the big climax of a “West Coast Studios” romantic melodrama called Should Husbands Work? (an obvious mockery of the overripe modern-dress movies Cecil B. DeMille was making at Paramount at the time). The film for Should Husbands Work? had never been taken out of the camera when the Gang came in to shoot their mock movie, so when the rushes are screened for the director and stars of Should Husbands Work?, the images of the Gang kids are superimposed over them. Ultimately the kids are chased off the “West Coast Studios” lot. The confusion over the title of the series came about when Roach sold the rights to it to MGM in 1938, but in the 1950’s he released the “Our Gang:” comedies he still owned (at least the ones made after sound came in) to TV as The Little Rascals, though even this early both titles were still being used. The title card of Dogs of War! announces it as an “Our Gang” comedy starring “Hal Roach’s Rascals” – and it’s a surprisingly pleasant and entertaining film with quite stunning slapstick gags.