Babes in Toyland (1934)

It’s often said, with some justification, that the 23 feature films made by Laurel and Hardy never came close to the genius of their 72 shorts. To be fair, the later ones do leave a bit to be desired but that would probably have been true of any short films they may have made. Time would have take its toll on their brand of comedy anyway and it’s doubtful that they could have maintained the quality of the earlier shorts, particularly as their directors and writers moved on or passed away. But the first dozen or so features are pretty good and Gus Meins and Charles Rogers’ Babes in Toyland is no exception. Long a staple of Thanksgiving/Christmas television programming in the States, a shortened 73 minute version (the original ran for 79 minutes) fell into the public domain and has circulated since under the new title March of the Wooden Soldiers, There have also been two computer colourised versions but I think we know what to do when presented with those…

And yet, despite the presence of Santa Claus (an uncredited Ferdinand Munier) the episodic plot, based on a 1903 operetta by Victor Herbert, barely features Christmas at all – per a line of dialogue, it is in fact set in July. Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy) are lodgers with Widow Peep (Florence Roberts), here cast as the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. Most of Toyland is owned by the evil Silas Barnaby (Henry Brandon) who threatens to foreclose on Mother Peep’s mortgage unless her daughter Bo (Charlotte Henry) marries him. Bo is in love with Tom-Tom (Felix Knight) and Stannie and Ollie determine to help the course of true love by clearing Tom-Tom of Barnaby’s trumped up charges of “pignapping” and defending Toyland from an invasion of Barnaby’s bogeymen from Bogeyland.

Babes in Toyland is a very strange film – part lightweight children’s film, part very dark horror film – but it’s charming and surreal enough to earn its exalted place as a perennial Christmas favourite. As well as Laurel and Hardy’s expertly timed slapstick routines, the film has plenty of eerie and sometimes unsettling moments. Bogeyland is a properly scary place, a cavernous subterranean hellhole with alligator infested rivers, cobwebbed caverns and revolting, ape-like monsters lurking in the shadows. When the bogeymen swarm out of Bogeyland and overrun Toyland at the climax, snatching creaming and terrified children from their beds, the film takes its darkest turn and plunges deep into full-blown horror territory. The make-up used for the fanged, simian creatures is basic and not terribly convincing but the effect is still the stuff of Yuletide nightmares. And their defeat by the army of life-sized wooden soldiers made by Stannie and Ollie gets even nastier with close-ups of the soldiers trampling bogeymen faces underfoot.

Elsewhere there are ghostly goblins – who appear in a musical interlude often cut from various prints – and the utterly bizarre sight of a mouse being played by a monkey in a Mickey Mouse costume. Producer Hal Roach had struck a deal with Walt Disney which allowed each other to use their “stars” in their own productions. Laurel and Hardy turned up in animated form in Mickey’s Polo Team (1936) and also appeared in Hollywood Party (1934), a live-action MGM comedy with animated inserts provided by Disney. The deal allowed Roach to not only use Frank Churchill and Ted Sears song Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf from the Oscar-winning Three Little Pigs (1933) but also the vague likeness of Disney’s biggest “star.” The mouse (never actually named as Mickey in the film) is a strange sight, cavorting about causing mischief and during the climactic battle piloting an airship to drop bombs on the invading bogeymen.

The human cast include the charming Charlotte Henry (the eponymous heroine of Paramount’s all-star adaptation of Alice in Wonderland the year before), the bland Felix Knight and in uncredited roles Angelo Rossitto and, extraordinarily, a child who would grow up to be porn star and director Zebedy Colt, both playing two of the three little pigs (though whether this claim has just become widely accepted fan lore or has any shred of truth is still unclear). Henry Brandon, just 22 years old at the time, attacks his role with considerable gusto, making even the most outrageous of silent movie villains seem restrained by comparison, but his over-the-top, pantomime performance works in the film’s favour. Barnaby, already vile enough at the start of the film, only becomes more monstrous – physically and morally – as the film goes along.

But naturally the film bursts into manic, hilarious life whenever Laurel and Hardy turn up. They don’t really do much that we haven’t seen them do many times before – though Stan’s remarkable skills in a game called “Pee-Wee” which involves a stick and a tapered piece of wood that returns like a boomerang when Stan uses it are remarkable and inevitably pressed into paramilitary service in the climax. And although they don’t get as much to do as we’d maybe like every time they turn up it’s impossible not to smile – their plan to dupe Barnaby by getting to unwittingly marry Stan is a comedy gem.

Babes in Toyland has turned up in many different forms over the years. A official re-release under the title March of the the Wooden Soldiers was divested of some nine minutes of footage and American television stations often created their own edits, removing some of the darker and scarier scenes. It’s turned up under the unlikely alternative title Revenge is Sweet and was subjected to the indignity of teh first of two computer colourisations in 1991. Disney remade it twice, as a feature film in 1961 and for the small screen in 1986. Neither version was as memorably odd, as childhood-damagingly scary or as wonderfully funny as the original. It may not be as good as the best of the Laurel and Hardy features (Sons of the Desert (1933), Way Out West (1937) – it doesn’t feature Stan and Ollie anywhere near enough for that) but it remains a wonderful, funny and, yes, frequently very disturbing film.