#Villains in laurel and hardy movies movie#

There’s a long sequence in the middle of the film where Laurel & Hardy have escaped prison and disguise themselves as African-American sharecroppers with all the facepaint that entails.I’ve some thoughts about other Laurel and Hardy films.Released by Hal Roach Studios | Directed by James Parrott I can’t do so because my recollections of seeing this film with a mixture of fascination and horror as a small child are too strong. I can’t judge this film as I would any other film with Stan and Ollie.

Ollie (who has done more than anyone else to save the community) is accidentally shot at with a cannon and needs to have about a thousand darts removed from him.

Fatal.Īt the end of the film, the wooden soldiers are finally unleashed and the bogeymen are repelled. Their relationship never recovered, eventually leading Stan to belief that he and Ollie would be better off working at some other studio. It is well known that Stan Laurel and significant and bitter arguments with Hal Roach about the direction of this film. Ollie is far sharper witted than he normally is. Stan has a strange and useful facility with bat and missile stunts. In most Laurel and Hardy features, they are given time simply to develop a tangential sketch – but not here. There is very little that they do that does not have a bearing on the main plot here. In all of this, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are central figures, but the film devotes comparatively little attention to their gags in isolation. The fact that (almost) everyone in town seems to find this ritual humiliation hilarious is quite chilling. The spectacle of our unintelligent but supremely benign heroes being subjected to this kind of theatrical societal revenge was quite traumatic. There was something about the ducking stool that shocked me in particular as a child. There is also an actually baby in a tree top as well that ought to terrify everyone. In many way, Toyland and its environs are cruel places. When Barnaby escapes to Toyland (after Ollie has exposed the fact that Barnaby tried to frame Tom Tom for the pignap and murder of one of the three little pigs), he is immediately acknowledged as leader of the Bogeymen. Barnaby is utterly remorseless and cruel – scarier by far than the bogeymen that surround Toyland. (Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee trick him into marrying Stannie instead).

It has a human/inhuman villain – Barnaby – who will throw a huge family out of that shoe house if Bo Peep does not agree to marry him. The film also incorporates operetta, and Tom Tom and Bo Peep spend a deal of time trilling at one another. It has fewer sets than Wizard of Oz making it feel like a version of stage pantomine. And they will scare us for longer.īabes in Toyland aka March of the Wooden Soldiers is scarier than Wizard of Oz.

#Villains in laurel and hardy movies movie#

At any rate – certain classic children’s films scare us in a particular way that no adult horror movie will ever scare us. Exposure to such nightmares is probably very good for us in the long run. That which is warm and familiar may be simultaneously hostile and threatening. And it is as a child you first witness fairy tale cuteness blended with pure malevolence. Nothing is scarier than a good children’s movie – for the simple reason that you tend to be a child when you first see it.