Gypsy Night

You can't have gypsies in a movie who don't sing, play and/or dance to 'Dark Eyes', as the tune is also known. There would be rioting in the street! The National Guard would have to come! The Hays Office would never approve the script.

It's one of the Warner Brothers 3-strip Technicolor shorts they issued in this period. They are a bizarre lot, and the bizarreness in this one is provided by crudely painted dolls (actually maquettes, figures on armatures). They come to life through the magic of stop-motion to sing for the pleasure of a crazy toymaker and his demonic children.

Cripes, this is a weird one, but the purpose of these shorts was to show off the Technicolor process, and it certainly does that, with some sharp-looking colors, although white tends to mutate into a pale green. Arrgh! They're singing again!

I am writing a review on this short to correct the error in the other review.He say,incorrectly,that this film is made in 2 strip Technicolor.Even if you only had a passing knowledge of Technicolour you would see that this film was a richness of tome and variety of hues that were impossible under the 2 strip process.The 2 strip process had been abandoned a couple of years earlier.The first 3 strip colour short was La Cucaracha in 1934 which lead to the first 3 strip colour feature,,Becky Sharp,made the same year as this short..Given that MGM had only tentatively started using this process,one gets the feeling that this is being used more as a test than an entertainment.

This is a short film from MGM that is in very vivid Three-Color Technicolor--the first truly full color film used in movies beginning about 1934. Up until then, color films were two-color varieties-- such as Two-Color Technicolor and Cinecolor...and the pictures looked rather orangey green. So, it's obvious when you watch the film that it is very pretty.

The film has little in the way of plot...just lots of singing by some stereotypical MGM Gypsies (yes, I know the appropriate modern PC term is Romani...don't hate on me for using the language of the day). Two little kids hang with these folks...and it isn't certain if they are Gypsies or not. Some of the songs are clearly intended for kids and they are all okay. However, there also are some singing puppets made of papier-mâché that are amazingly creepy as they sing...so creepy that instead of seeing the Romani as good people, they may have created a whole new generation who distrusts them! To make things worse, demons then appear and torment the kids, as they apparently are brats and deserve to have awful nightmares.

So is it any good? Well, it looks nice. Other than that, it's a rather saccharine thing...with some really creepy moments as well as many dull ones (how could they make dancing demons dull?!). An odd little curio that is hard to love.

Many within the industry of "Golden Age" Hollywood, from the studio executives on down to the creative "little people," were of Russian or of Eastern European origin. This short reflects their tastes in children's entertainment, where naughty or mischievous children are punished or otherwise scared to death through the telling of some wild folk tale. An unusually placid and sober band of Russian Gypsies sing and dance, and the kindly old toymaker offers to share the magic of his wooden (well, paper mache) toys with two sweet little boys. The dolls begin to sing, and by the time the torn up, broken dolls began to break out into song my 10-year-old daughter said "Dad, this is creeping me out." The two boys later share a devilish nightmare to similar effect. Folks who love Tim Burton's "The Nightmare Before Christmas" will really enjoy this, though you may want to consult Lazlo Moholy-Nagy's "Gypsies" (1933) to get a real taste of the non-Hollywood gypsy experience. This short is in two-strip technicolor, and in technical terms looks like something that could've been produced five years earlier.