Oh Boy

When Hal Roach had his great success with the "Our Gang" series, other producers waited a couple of years. When the series not only stayed around, but prospered mightily, several other firms tried to imitate it. They failed. I attribute this to the producer-director Robert McGowan (not his nephew Bob, who directed some of the dire dregs of the series the 1940s), who had the unlikely knack of figuring out how to let kids visibly be kids. Even in the more fantastic ones in which they got to play with real railroads, they look like kids playing.

With this series, produced by Joe Rock for Bray, however, the kids are clearly acting and only Peaches Jackson seems comfortable. The others are all clearly in costume, like the rich kid in the Fauntleroy suit, or the Irish kid who grimaces a lot. It's an episode in which the poorer kids with the jalopy take on the rich kid in the limousine, with some gags that might have worked with adult actors -- in fact, I've seen several comedies in which they do work -- but in this version, the point is that it's kids who are doing this. That reduces this comedy to a freak show, or a waltzing bear: the point is not how well they do it, but that they do it at all.

This is one of the silent films repatriated from New Zealand and is available on the National Film Preservation site in a beautiful print. It's a pity the film isn't of the same quality as the transfer.

Due to the success of Hal Roach's Our Gang series, there soon were quite a few knock-off versions by rival studios. "Oh Boy" looks much like an Our Gang film....as did the Mickey McGuire series (starring Mickey Rooney) and a few others. However, none of them ever came close to the quality and staying power of Roach's films.

Like the Our Gang comedies, this one had many of the same sorts of characters....the fat kid, the black kid, the rich effeminate kid as a rival as well as a dog. If you didn't know better, you'd swear that this Bray production was an Our Gang film....that is until you realized it just wasn't as fun to watch.

In "Oh Boy", the effeminate rich kid, Cuthbert, is out to romance the girl across the street. The gang tries to stop him and ends up getting beaten up by the surprisingly macho boy. However, things get very weird. In the Our Gang shorts, often the kids had homemade fire engines or cars...but they clearly were kid-powered toys. Here, inexplicably, Cuthbert and the kids all drive real automobiles...which really makes no sense at all nor is there any explanation of this....it just is. Ultimately, there's another showdown and Cuthbert is bested.

Apart from a joke involving suspenders, there aren't any real laughs in this one. Also, the underlying message is that if a boy is effeminate, the best thing to do is beat him up for the good of society! All in all, not funny and a bit mean spirited....and ample proof that the Roach films simply had better writing and better characters.