NOTE: We occassionally run Guest Voice posts from thoughtful readers (and those who comment under our posts). This is the SECOND PART of three-part review of the DVD of Laurel and Hardy’s classic film “March of the Wooden Soldiers” (aka “Babes in Toyland”) written by Dan Schneider who sometimes leaves comments on this site. See link below for Part I. Schneider has this site and this new film site.
DVD Review Of Babes In Toyland (aka “March of the Wooden Soldiers”)
(Part II)
Copyright © by Dan Schneider
Babes In Toyland, while it may not be technically a better film than The Wizard Of Oz, is the better and more effective film, and its moments of strangeness and scariness far surpass the Judy Garland vehicle.
The tale follows the abortive love tale of the Peter Panian Tom Tom the Piper’s son (Felix Knight) and Bo Peep (Charlotte Henry), the oldest daughter of Mother Peep (Florence Roberts), who lives in a shoe, and who rents a room to Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee. Old Silas Barnaby (Henry Brandon; although credited as Harry Kleinbach), sort of an Ebenezer Scrooge on LSD, and with a bent for pedophilia, holds Mother Peep’s overdue mortgage and wants to foreclose and toss her out, unless Bo Peep agrees to marry him. She refuses, and Barnaby threatens Mother Peep with eviction.
Ollie says he’ll get the money from the Toymaker (William Burress), his employer- who is almost as misanthropic as Barnaby. But, the duo get fired from their jobs after Santa Claus (Ferdinand Munier) stops by- in mid-July, we learn, to check in on his order of six hundred one foot toy soldiers, which Stannie mistook for a hundred six foot toy soldiers. Unable to pay Barnaby, for Mother Peep, the pair try to steal the mortgage (apparently in Toyland legal documents are not filed with the state) but get caught when Stannie screws up. He and Ollie are sentenced to dunking in the water hole and banishment to Bogeyland for attempted burglary. Ollie gets dunked, and almost drowns when his weight is too great for the seat he’s pinned to, and it breaks, keeping him underwater.
Bo Peep relents, and consents to marry Barnaby, who withdraws his charges, meaning Stannie need not get dunked. Ollie, angered over this, tosses him into the water, forgetting that he gave Stannie his watch to hold, so it wouldn’t get wet. This film is filled with many tiny details like this that slide in with no fanfare, and simply are funny, even though many can be seen coming a mile away, as the best slapstick always is.
At the wedding, Stannie, in a veil, marries Barnaby instead of Bo Peep, and Ollie rips up the mortgage. How this sequence can be seen in light of current political conundra like gay marriage (not to mention the first scene of the boys sleeping in the same bed, as a wafted feather blows back and forth between them), is interesting, in the least. For revenge, Barnaby kidnaps one of the three pigs, and frames Tom Tom as the kidnapper and, presumably, murderer, for a string of sausage is found in his home. Tom Tom is banished to Bogeyland, across a moat filled with real, yes real, alligators. But, when Stannie munches on the sausage, it turns out to be beef.
They free the pig, and the residents of Toyland seek to lynch Barnaby, who escapes down his well, which is a secret entry to Bogeyland, where Barnaby turns out to be the Master of the legendary Bogeymen. Bo Peep, meanwhile, has gone across the moat to Bogeyland to rescue Tom Tom and the pair fall asleep, as wraithic dwarves sprinkle sleeping dust on them. Barnaby tries to kidnap her, but he and Tom Tom tussle. Tom Tom bests him, but Barnaby summons his monsters. They chase after Bo Peep, Tom Tom, and Stannie and Ollie- who went down the well after Barnaby, yet all make it back up the well to Toyland.
The final four minutes are the climax of the film, and where it gets its alternate title, March Of The Wooden Soldiers, which was the 1948 re-release’s title. As the Bogeymen ravage Toyland- there’s one truly nightmarish scene where a Bogeyman crawls through a bedroom window in Mother Peep’s shoe, to get Mother Peep’s screaming small children (a seminal juvenile fear), Stannie and Ollie fight back with darts that, after Stannie wacks them with a stick, amazingly only seem to hit Bogeymen, not Toylanders. The exception is when a dart pierces a small zeppelin that the third rate Mickey Mouse mouse clone, from the tale the Cat And The Fiddle, is flying, to toss bombs at the Bogeymen.
But, Barnaby seems triumphal until the duo unleash the toy soldiers. They rout the Bogeymen, and Barnaby is crushed in a house made of children’s blocks. When the letters fall they spell R-A-T. As a final blow, Stannie shoots a cannon full of darts at the Bogeymen, but it turns around and zings Ollie as he writhes to the film’s fadeout.
Of course, none of this makes logical sense- such as why the toy soldiers can suddenly slash at the Bogeymen and not the good Toylanders whereas before they were just automata, or why the Bogeymen and Barnaby never conquered Toyland earlier, or at night, when access via Barnaby’s well would have made it easy pickin’s; yet this is precisely why the film delights and scares, like a real nightmare, and far more so than hackneyed slasher or zombie flicks.
The very chaotic nature of all the characters lends a certain horror to even the silliest and most banal events. When things are ‘not right’ even the ordinary becomes frightening- think of the odd twin girls, or the fellating Dogman in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. Anarchy and illogic are always far scarier than the most disciplined evil.
The final installment of this three part review runs tomorrow.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.