Lazy Days

This was a slow moving short picture. The general theme is lazy days of summer, but the film just plods along. It was only okay. There were some scenes that should have changed that could have helped the film along. The crying baby was annoying and the director should have reassured the baby so that the child wouldn't be crying so much. I'm sure a parent was on the site so the dad or mom was likely there to have assisted. Farina got the most screen time and did okay with what he was given. All the kids just had to do was act out being tired in the hot summer day and it made you tired watching it. The contraption that the Farina family invented for rocking the baby, rocking Farina, fanning Farina and playing music was clever.

One part was fun to see. In the background of the last quarter of the film, the kids are out near a public area and fairly close to a regular gas station and street and you can see the traffic going by. It was nice to see all the old autos and trucks going about their business unawares as this was being filmed on the next block. That road is probably a big 6 lane road now.

This Hal Roach comedy short, Lazy Days, is the ninety-second in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series and the fourth talkie. It begins with Farina just laying under the tree with sis Janine doing his every command. Oh, and Pete the Pup also serves a function here: he runs back and forth in some kind of see-saw contraption which not only swings Farina's hammock but also his baby brother's rocking bed! Elsewhere, the rest of the gang discover a baby contest notice and Joe decides to pass Chubby off as the "fattest baby" (Joe should be familiar with that one as he himself was passed off as such in the silent Cradle Robbers). I'll stop there and just say this was one of the most dreary of the early Our Gang talkies-despite some of what I just described-with a slow pace throughout. So on that note, Lazy Days is only worth a look once.

This early Our Gang talkie, the third one of its kind, features "Farina" and his pals down on the farm. It's a lazy day and Farina is so slow-motion that he even has another kid put a straw in his mouth so he can drink. At first, all the animals are lying around doing nothing, too, but eventually they get up and go for swim, or get something to eat,or play.....but "Farina" (Allen Hoskins) just likes there sounding like a young Stephin Fetchit, too "tired" to do anything.

Anyway, after about eight minutes, we finally see the rest of the gang, and things liven up. The kids discover a poster about a baby contest being held later that day with big prize money for the "biggest baby," "cutest baby," "strongest baby" all the way down to "homeliest baby." Wow, what mother wouldn't be proud of that? The kids decide to wash up the little ones, but they don't want any part of it so Chubby pretends, reluctantly, to be the baby. What happens in the contest, I'll leave up to you to see, but the ending is a surprise one.

Most of the gags in this 21-minute "movie" involve Farina. Some reminded me of sight-gags The Three Stooges used, such as a frog spitting a large spray of something in Curly's face. Here, Farina is the victim.

All in all, as other reviewers said here, this isn't one of the better Our Gang talkies, but it's worth one look.

Joe reads an ad for a baby contest and gets the idea of having all the brothers and sisters of the Gang dressed up like babies to win all the prize money--including Joe's brother, Chubby (who looks NOTHING like a baby). In the end, it's all for naught.

One nice thing about the Our Gang comedies is that they were, for the 1920s and 30s, very egalitarian. After all, there were black kids in the gang (such as Farina, Stymie and Buckwheat) and they were treated by the other kids very well--in an era when Black-Americans were, at best, second-class citizens. Yet, sometimes, amidst this anti-racist casting decision by Hal Roach Studios, a bit of the sick prejudices of the age come clearly into focus. In this film, Farina plays a very different sort of character. Here in "Lazy Days" he's incredibly lazy and shiftless--and none of this routine is funny. What's worse is that the end, 'ol Petey the dog rolls a watermelon to Farina--and the credits roll!! Ugghh. Racist AND not particularly funny at the same time. Not surprisingly, when the series was syndicated for television, this was one of the few that was not shown as it was considered too racist for modern sensibilities.

This is the third Little Rascals sound film, and it is wonderfully whimsical and amusing. The cast has expanded for this one, both of children and of animals. The film opens with Farina lying prostrate with heat and laziness in a makeshift rocking chair in a small farmyard. He has acquired a friend, a little black girl from next door, whose name is Trellis, played by the six year-old actress Jannie Hoskins. She started appearing in films as a one year-old infant. She had appeared in 22 Little Rascals silent films before this, under three different names: Mango, Arnica, and Zuccini. (Her real life nickname was Zuchini, known in France and Britain as a courgette.) After this, she would appear in only one more Little Rascals film, six years later, TEACHER'S BEAU (1935), and then she would retire from the screen at the great age of 12. (She lived to be 72.) Here, she is rushing back and forth fetching things for the lazy Farina and tending to him as he keeps asking her to do things for him because he is too lazy to get up. Finally, when she refuses one thing, he drolly states: ' Then I ain't gonna marry you when I get big.' The animal cast includes a goat, a donkey, a cat, Pete the Dog (who rocks a baby in a cradle by running back and forth in an ingenious device), hens and chicks, a rooster prostrated with heat, and even a pet monkey belonging to a neighbour. Oh yes, and I must not forget to mention the most important zoological star of all in this film, a bee, whose main interest in life seems to be threatening to sting the Little Rascals. After the extended scenes between Farina and Trellis, we see Joe reading a circular for a 'grand baby contest', and he decides that he and the rest of the gang will take their baby brothers and sisters to enter the contest for Most Beautiful Baby, Fattest Baby, Biggest Baby, etc., and win lots of money for the prizes. However, there are not enough babies, so they fabricate two of them. Mary dresses up three year-old Wheezer as a baby, and Joe stuffs Chubby into large baby clothes to try for the prize of Fattest Baby. Off they go, pushing all their real and pretend babies in prams. Farina's pram collapses on the way and he goes to lie down in the shade of a large tree. He comforts himself by saying hat he would only have won a quarter (25 cents) anyway, then pulls one out of his pocket, and says: 'I've got a quarter anyway, and I'm too lazy even to spend this one.' Farina's baby brother, Thermos, is played by Junior Allen, who is a genuine infant in a cot. He never appears in any other film, so that this is the only time we see him. In preparing him for the contest, Farina had given him a bath in a zinc tub in the yard, fetching the water from a filthy duck pool. A frog appears in the tub and squirts water in Farina's face several times. As usual, the Little Rascals engage in complete childish anarchy. What fun! Robert F. McGowan directs, as always.