Shivering Shakespeare

This is the seventh Little Rascals sound film, 20 minutes long. Shakespeare does not actually feature in the film, which is entirely devoted to a school play of QUO VADIS staged at the school attended by the Little Rascals. (The fact that Wheezer is only four years old and could not yet be at school is conveniently set aside, and there he is declaiming the lines of an ancient Roman.) Pete the Dog is of course in attendance, and howls at an appropriate moment. The chief Rascals in the action of this film are Chubby, who plays the Emperor Nero, Farina who plays a sorcerer 'from darkest Africa', and Mary Ann, who plays a Christian girl who is going to be thrown to the lions. For those who do not know, QUO VADIS was at this time an extremely famous book. It is a novel written by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz (pronounced 'Syen-kyay-vitch'), who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for writing it. It is set in Rome at the time of Nero, and is a very powerful and dramatic work. Sienkiewicz was a brilliant author, and is still a literary hero to Poles today, who all have to read him in school (though not this novel, instead they read his many Polish historical novels). QUO VADIS was what we call 'a runaway international best-seller' which sold millions of copies. One reason for its success was its description of the early Christians, who were being persecuted by Nero, since until the 1970s, Christianity was still very important to everyone in the 'mass market'. If it were published today, few people would buy it, I expect, despite its being very good. No one cares about early Christians anymore, at least not in films. QUO VADIS was made into a famous Hollywood epic film in 1951 with Peter Ustinov playing Nero. I remember asking Peter, whom my wife and I knew very well, what it was like playing Nero. He said he had to remember to keep squinting up his eyes, because Nero was notoriously near-sighted. He felt ambivalent about giving the thumbs-down to the gladiators in the Colisseum, since although it made him feel powerful, it also made him feel guilty at the same time. The costumes worn by the kids in the school play are extremely lavish, well above the budget of any actual school play. Everything imaginable that could go wrong with the production does go wrong. Comic situations abound, and not only the Rascals but all the parents and adults attending the performance throw custard pieces in each other's face, so that a very congenial total chaos results.

The Gang is involved in a really, really lame play. None of the kids know their lines and one mistake after another occurs. In addition to the kids, Officer Kennedy (Edgar Kennedy) is on hand--and he's just as untalented as the rest. Later, some mean kids in the audience begin throwing food at the actors as they put on the lamest version of "Quo Vadis" in history.

Aside from not being all that funny, this short suffers from relatively poor sound--which is made worse because the short is MUCH more talky than usual and there are no closed captions on the DVD. At the end, they had a giant pie fight (some of it in slow motion) but WHY they did this was never at all apparent. A limp short with little to recommend it.

The early sound shorts in the Our Gang series were scattershot, quality-wise, depending on which director was handling the episode at hand. Full-time director Bob McGowan saw the new era through to its maturity. Other early sound-era episodes, like "When the Wind Blows" (L&H director James W. Hornes' one-shot Rascals short), and series co-director Anthony Mack's efforts (Mack was really Robert Anthony McGowan, nephew of Bob), were a few times good, but mostly misfires.

Mack was a semi-skilled director at best: the man just didn't latch onto how to pace and shape a film. But the present episode presents an ingenious compromise: being merely a semi-skilled director, Anthony Mack proves just about the ideal choice to direct an episode with this plot: the gradeschooler kids are supposed to be players in the cast of a small-town production of "Quo Vadis" which quickly becomes one big joke by means of forgotten lines, a harried and loud and pretentious schoolmarm, and an extended pie-throwing melee to cap things off. Norman "Chubby" Chaney shines in his attempt to be Nero, The result is an episode that cuts the mustard, at least in this reviewer's opinion. Some of the punchlines fail to come off, but a hearty good time generally.

A large, hilarious supporting cast help put this one over the edge.

Shivering Shakespeare (1930)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Kennedy the Cop's wife puts on a play of "Quo Vadis" and wouldn't you know that she casts the gang to major parts. The first night of the play kicks off and naturally the kids begin to forget their lines and more bad stuff happens, which all leads to a big pie fight. Once again it seems the screenwriter didn't even try to make this thing funny. I'm sitting and watching this short and kept asking myself where it was trying to gain comedy from. From the forgotten lines? This didn't work. From the curtains falling at the wrong time? Perhaps this was suppose to be funny but it's not. Is the pie fight suppose to be funny? Well, I guess it is but I've yet to watch one that has made me laugh. I'm only familiar with the later day shorts and some of the silents but I'm finding those so much better than these early sound ones. Hopefully I'll run into some better ones soon.

This one had me laughing until the pie fight at the end. I was sorry to see it end that way. I thought the adult participation was very amusing and expressed the way the people would really feel about each other if this had been produced in real life. It was very natural and personal. You don't see natural man to man interactions any more. The scenes with the men dressed as animals were irresistible. The children acted like children would at that time, too - it was all very believable. And the lady in charge of this drama was the perfect spinster librarian type everyone liked to ridicule, only no more nor less than she, too, would have been in real life. The mothers were also very motherly and warm and attached to their children. I could relate to them - far more than I can relate to the mothers I meet today, most of whom seem to feel very little for their children. I feel a very warm affection for the time when family love was still so much a part of people's lives.