Our Gang - The Early Days (1922 - 1933)
By John V. Brennan
Baby boomers know them as The
Little Rascals. Movie audiences of the twenties, thirties and forties
knew them as Our Gang. By any name, Hal Roach's irrepressible group of
fun-loving kids have amused and amazed us for over 80 years.
The Silent Years
The idea of creating a series starring real children came to Hal Roach in 1922 as he was looking out his office window. He became fascinated with a group of young boys fighting over a pile of sticks. As he stood there laughing, he thought that if he could capture that natural youthful energy on film, he might have a hit.
Roach always believed that the most successful comedians are childlike, and the Our Gang series took his theory one step further, making children themselves the comedians. It soon became one of the most popular of all his series, and aside from Laurel and Hardy, it is the only Roach series that the general public is still familiar with.
Roach comedian Charlie Chase, under his real name of Charles Parrott,
supervised some of the earliest Our Gang shorts, but Robert F. McGowan
eventually became the guiding director behind the series. The
silent Our Gang films featured a marvelously talented group.
Freckle-faced Mickey
Daniels
was the leader, and fat Joe
Cobb,
scruffy
Jackie Condon,
pretty Mary Kornman, smiling Ernie "Sunshine Sammy"
Morrison and derbie-crowned Harry
Spears rounded out the eclectic group.
Though this
set of
rascals has not been burned into the collective consciousness of those
who grew up watching The Little Rascals on television (the silents were
not included in the Film Classics TV package), the silent shorts are
truly delightful and are a perfect example of the wit, warmth and pure
fun that was the hallmark of Hal Roach films.
"Petey" - Pete the Pup
The silent films also introduced the eternal symbol of the series, Pete
the Pup. The original Pete was a movie veteran
even before
entering the Our Gang series, having starred in Harold Lloyd's THE
FRESHMAN (1923) and the Buster Brown series. The distinctive
ring
around the talented pitbull's eye came from his days as Buster Brown's
dog, Tige, and was not a natural phenomenon - it was actually painted
on with dye by the Buster Brown people and it would not come
off!
Petey was not actually one dog, but a series of dogs, each with its own
distinctive look (every few years, the ring would change to the other
eye!). Since Petey could be replaced every few years, he
became
one of Our Gang's longest lasting cast members, staying on through
1938.
The Early Talkies
By 1929, talking films were here to stay, and there was no doubt that Our Gang, its popularity undiminished after 8 years of being on the screen, would continue. However, it took a while for the series to adapt to the new technology. The first Our Gang talkies were often awkward and slow. Shorts could be too enamored by the novelty of sound (Small Talk, When the Wind Blows), or just plain weird (Boxing Gloves, a strange hybrid of sound and silent footage). But after about a dozen films, the series found its footing again and maintained a remarkable consistency that no other Roach series could hope to match. From Pups is Pups (1931) through Hide and Shriek (1938 - the last Hal Roach short), there are dozens of classics, an equal amount of great films, a large group of thoroughly enjoyable if average romps, and only a small handful of genuine misfires. This consistency can be attributed to Hal Roach, who always paid special attention to the series and handpicked many of the members, and to directors McGowan, Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, the three men who helmed the majority of the films through the years.
The early Our Gang
sound films iof 1930 and
'31 are almost all
uniformly heartwarming and funny, and based on real situations
audiences of the Great Depression could easily relate to.
They featured the Gang stuck in a world with
mean step-mothers, irritable neighbors, heartless dog-catchers, shotgun
toting
chicken farmers, befuddled cops, and, once in a while, a kindly old
grandma. The Gang
was always remarkably
diverse, featuring white kids, black kids, Oriental kids, fat kids,
skinny
kids, tough kids, wimpy kids, rich kids, poor kids, young kids, older
kids,
dogs, monkeys, mules, the occassional goat...
always hanging tough together and rising above their
troubles
through
their wit, spirit and creativity.
As
Our Gang enthusiast Leonard Maltin has noted, the Our Gang shorts had
more
integration between races than the feature pictures being filmed in the
same
era. Whereas in
most feature films,
black men were almost always porters or janitors, in the world of Our
Gang, the
black members, like Stymie and Farina, were always on an equal footiing
with
their white counterparts. Skin color meant nothing to the other kids.
Jackie Cooper
Jackie Cooper
dominated the films of 1930 and '31 films. Cooper, a
good-looking, scrappy young lad, inherited the
role of "gang leader", left vacant for a while by the departure of
Mickey Daniels from the series. Cooper was always good, but
he
was never better than in the "Miss Crabtree" trio of films Teacher's Pet, School's Out and Love Business,
where he falls for
his teacher (and who could blame him for falling for June
Marlowe?). In these three classics, he shows such a range of
emotions, it is no wonder that other studios wanted him. He
is
fondly remembered today not only for his work with Our Gang but also
for his non-Roach features like SKIPPY, TREASURE ISLAND and THE
CHAMP. Cooper was also one of the few child actors from Our
Gang
that went on to a long successful acting career. Film fans
will
remember him as grouchy Daily Planet editor Perry White in all four of
the Christopher Reeves SUPERMAN movies.
Farina and Stymie
Another great
early talent was the laconic and hilarious Allen "Farina" Hoskins,
who
had started as a toddler in the silent films. Farina was a
natural talent who knew how to give his lines just the right
inflection. Farina was as versatile an actor as Cooper and
had an
amazing ability to cry on cue. When he grew too old
to
remain in the series, Farina was replaced by Matthew "Stymie" Beard,
who earned his nickname by constantly being underfoot of director Bob
McGowan ("Boy, that kid stymies me all the time!"). Stymie
could
handle jokes and wisecracks with the best of them, and consequently got
some of the best lines and dialogue routines of the series. According
to Stymie himself, the derby he wore actually belonged to his hero Stan
Laurel. Avid Rascals fans can spot a grown up Stymie in television
shows and movies of the 70s, such as THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY.
Wheezer, Chubby and Mary Ann
Bobby "Wheezer" Hutchins
was an adorable kid with a devilish smile that lit up the
screen.
Some of the most enjoyable moments in the films of this period comes
from simply watching Wheezer frolic in bed with Pete the Pup or seeing
his face light up with honest admiration while listening to the latest
rambling stories from his pal Stymie. Wheezer's best film, and indeed
one of the best shorts Roach ever produced, is Dogs is Dogs.
Using a
typically melodramatic plot (Wheezer battling an evil guardian and her
spoiled brat of a son, and oh yeah, they hate his dog too), Dogs is
Dogs, like all the great Our Gang films, combines humor,
dialogue,
pathos and pure slapstick, and concludes with a fairy tale ending that
undoubtedly brought smiles to the faces of Depression audiences.
Norman "Chubby" Chaney
replaced
Joe Cobb as the fat kid. Chubby
had an abundance of everything, especially comic talent.
Chubby's
rotundity, combined with an innocent, babylike face, made him instantly
lovable, and he seemed to have learned a great deal from Oliver Hardy
in the art of facial pantomime --- Chubby was always good for a killer
closeup. Mary
Ann Jackson,
a befreckled tomboy, owned the best repetoire of facial expressions in
Our Gang history. Her talents
are shown to great effect in films like When the Wind Blows,
The First Seven Years
and the Miss
Crabtree trilogy.
All Rascals Great and Small
Hal
Roach and his casting directors had an unfaltering ability to find just
the
right kids to add to the mix year after year, a talent evident not only
in his
choice of the "stars" but even in the lesser spotlighted
youngsters. The
best gang members
possessed a distinctive face, a knack for doing takes and
doubletakes,
and a remarkable facility for taking a tomato in the face without
blinking an
eye. Roach and
company had such
discriminating tastes when it came to who would and wouldn't join the
Gang that
they actually turned away both Mickey Rooney and Shirley Temple, not
because
they lacked talent, but because they did not fit into Roach's vision of
the
Gang.
At Roach,
everybody learned from the
success of Laurel and Hardy that you could double the laughs in a film
by
following a gag immediately with a funny reaction shot from someone
else, and
many Gang members seemed to be recruiited specifically for such shots. Typical of these unsung,
mid-level gang
members was Dorothy
DeBorba,
the kind of Our Ganger who never had a
story built
around her, but who could steal a scene from a more seasoned member
with a
perfectly executed popeyed look or scowl.
Our Gang director Bob McGowan was an expert at
coaxing
great performances out of these kids, even for two second closeups.
Spanky
A three year old George "Spanky" McFarland arrived in 1932 and had so much natural charisma, even at that age, that Roach and McGowan refocused the entire series around him. Eventually adding dozens of slang replies into the Gang lexicon ("Don't rush me, Big Boy", "You're tellin' me!", "And how!"), Spanky became the center of the Our Gang world almost as soon as he entered it, and continued to be through the forties.
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Copyright © 2010, John V. Brennan