|
Nursery-rhyme operetta à la Hal Roach. Mother Goose (Virginia Karns) steps out of the oversized book to introduce Toyland's denizens, screens within screens materialize as the pages flip. As teeming as a Bosch, the tuneful canvas is packed with tear-way dollhouses and rotating windmills, complete with a little medieval torture device for dunking pariahs. Little Bo-Peep (Charlotte Henry) loves Tom-Tom (Felix Knight) but is courted by the bent miser Barnaby (Henry Brandon), who contorts for the camera like Caligari. Her mother (Florence Roberts) shares her shoe-house with Stannie Dum (Stan Laurel) and Ollie Dee (Oliver Hardy), warehouse goofballs who bungle the Christmas order and end up with an army of mechanical soldiers. Decked out in bridal whites to foil the villain's wedding to Bo-Peep, Stannie bawls when suddenly faced with marital obligations: "I can't stay with him," he whispers to Ollie, "I don't love him!" Renoir's La Petite Marchande d'Allumettes is key to the filming, a surge of sweet surrealism closer to the Fleischers than to Disney. (A certain mouse with white gloves scampers alongside a feline humanoid sawing a fiddle, a vision somewhere between Krazy Kat and David Lynch.) Rubbery piglets in sailor suits bobbing to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf" and the raid by Bogeyland ogres (with torches aloft, dart fusillades and rampant bayoneting) keep the nightmare fuel flowing. Into The Wizard of Oz and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory it goes, to say nothing of The Archers' The Tales of Hoffmann. With Marie Wilson, Kewpie Morgan, and William Burress. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |