Bring Home the Turkey

This Hal Roach comedy, Bring Home the Turkey, is the fifty-seventh in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. The gang are being treated real cruel by the master of the orphanage, brandishing a bullwhip to them. But thanks to a black male living nearby, along with his three "kids" of Farina, Mango, and Pleurisy, providing them food and entertainment, they get by. But after being found out of having no legal recourse of caring for those three children, this Uncle Tom has them taken from him and sent to that very orphanage...This short was moderately amusing till the hilarious end though there is quite an entertaining Rube Goldberg-inspired sequence at the beginning. So that's a recommendation of Bring Home the Turkey. P.S. Mango is actually Allen "Farina" Hoskins' little sis, Jannie. Uncle Tom was played by actual Caucasian actor Tom Wilson who doesn't look offensive since he doesn't use white lips as is the usual characterization of such characters. He's probably best known as the cop who chases Charlie Chaplin and Jackie Coogan in The Kid.

"Bring Home the Turkey" is one of the most disturbing installments of Our Gang I've ever seen...and I've seen most of their movies! It's supposed to be a comedy but is one of the few I don't recommend you show small kids! Why? Well, during the course of the film you see a man with a giant bull whip chasing the kids and trying to beat them, a cook chases Farina with a huge butcher knife, a dog gets severely beaten, a child is thrown by one of these abusers and all this occurs by the middle of the film!! It's amazingly dark and nothing comedic at all happens. "Oliver Twist" by comparison is like a Disney cartoon! Fortunately, it all ends well...but only after seeing a virtual horror show!

Charley Young is the guy in charge of the ironically named "Happyland" orphanage, where he has a bullwhip he uses on Our Gang; the rest of the staff has long knives. Naturally the kids are terrified, so they send a note to Tom Wilson to rescue them.

The modern viewer will have a lot of trouble with this entry in the long-running series. It's not just the violence offered the children -- which is part and parcel of the story -- but Tom Wilson is clearly in blackface. This is, I believe, because he joins in the physical fight against Young and his bravadoes. Having a real black man offering violence to any White individual in this era would have been politically incorrect in the era.

It's a good one nonetheless. Wilson lives in a shack that he has rigged up with all sorts of home-made work-saving devices, including a mangle to make pancakes, as well as my favorite comedy prop, a Murphy bed.