Official Officers

"Official Officers" is an unusual installment of the Our Gang comedies as it's set in the inner city. Most seemed to be set in the suburbs or even the country.

When the story begins, the kids have no place to play and often play in the streets...which is very dangerous. To make matters worse, the cop on this beat, Officer McManus, is a bully and has no sympathy for the kids. And, not surprisingly, the kids fear him. However, the Police Inspector gets a look at McManus' actions and soon replaces him with another officer who tries hard to make the community like him. As a result, the kids now begin playing policeman...and they want to be just like them. So what will they do when now civilian McManus returns and is looking for trouble?

This installment of Our Gang finds the film with less emphasis on laughs and more on social commentary. I think it has a great point to make and the story is timeless.

By the way, this is the first appearance of Farina's real life sister, Jannie. She is adorable...just like her little big brother!

The Gang are inner city kids with nowhere to play, so they improvise a baseball game at a street intersection. The officer on the beat, "Hard Boiled" McManus, thinks the kids are nothing but troublemakers and sends them away. A police investigator witnesses McManus's cruel treatment of the kids and others and replaces him with a kinder, gentler officer. This officer befriends the Gang and makes them Junior Officers, complete with their own paddy wagon. The usual brand of Our Gang chaos ensues; will the Gang capture criminals and get back at McManus?

"Official Officers" is not the best "Our Gang" silent film, but it is better than average. Joe Cobb has some funny moments; Joe likes bananas, but the fruit vendor has placed them on a rope above his reach. No problem; Joe sits on a lift for painters and is able to capture some bananas as the painters climb up the side of the building!

There is not much focus on the Gang as officers; some comic moments could have been developed from this scenario, but they were not fleshed out for the film. All in all, however, "Official Officers" is above average. The print of the film viewed for this review is crisp and clean for the most part; it appears the film was saved for home movie use and it represents one of the cleaner "Our Gang" silent films in existence (many Gang films from this period suffer from being duped nearly white.)

A nice outing. 8 out of 10.

Official Officers (1925)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent Our Gang short has the kids playing baseball in the streets and narrowly being hit by passing cars. A new officer replaces a mean one and he tries to connect with the kids by making them junior cops. This isn't a masterpiece or a film with many great laughs but it's decent enough if you want to waste twenty-minutes. I think the majority of the jokes don't work nearly as good as you'd hope and this includes about a five-minute sequence where Joe decides to take advantage of him being a cop by eating free bananas from a local vendor. He ends up eating dozens of them and afterwards must try and come up with new ways to get more bananas from the owner. Another joke as Sammy arresting Farina but he keeps slipping through the jail gates. The first portion of the film contains some pretty good laughs as the "mean cop" is a rather interesting character and got a few laughs with his abuse of the vendor. The highlight of the film has to be the quick scene where James Finlayson gets a ball upside his head. That's not the funny bit but the real laugh comes from seeing him with a full head of hair.

Patrolman Jack Gavin is kicked off the force for being mean to everyone, and is replaced by Dick Gilbert. He appoints Our Gang Junior Officers, which means mostly get to play at it -- Joe Cobb eats most of two bunches of bananas off an Italian fruit seller.

The settings of the series ranged from upper-class hotels to urban poor, but this is the first one I recall in which they are big-city poor kids, trying to play in a street filled with trash and traffic. The former vanishes quickly enough and the traffic goes away soon enough, and it's up to the kids to perform their gags. It's always amazing to me how series director Robert McGowan got such naturalistic and funny performances out of kids, some of whom were less than two years old. Yet he did.