Love-Tails of Morocco

Soldiers of the French Foreign Legion tell tales of how they came to join the the force, inevitably involving women acting like .... well, female dogs in this episode of DOGVILLE series.

When I note in the title that this would have been better without dogs, I mean this would have been an amusing Pre-code comedy with human actors. the fact that I consider that all of the Dogville shorts would have been better without the dogs is more due to the way the dogs are unhappy, stuffed into costumes. You can tell by the way they hold their tails. Of course, humans would have been equally unhappy, but that's show business.

Jules White, unable or perhaps unwilling to further torment dogs, moved to Columbia and practiced his torturous talents on the Three Stooges, whom no one objected to torturing.

Love-Tails of Morocco (1931)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Fun entry in MGM's "Dogville" series, which of course has dogs playing the parts that you'd normally see humans doing. This film is a spoof of the Foreign Legion movies that were popular at the time as four dogs sit around and discuss why they entered the Legion. All four dogs tell their stories that deal with women that did them wrong. The Dogville series has always been hit and miss with me but there's no question that these are the most surreal shorts from this era. The site of having dogs walking, talking, kissing and doing a variety of others things just comes off very strange and especially with the technology used at the time, which usually meant strings being tried to the dogs to get them to "act" the way the directors wanted. This entry has a few very funny moments including one where one of the dogs killed four woman because of their nagging at a bridge game. Another good story has a dog coming home and catching his wife with another dog. One of the funniest bits happens in the third story when two dogs go for a gun duel but things don't go as planned. I'm sure many animal lovers might be offended to see how some of the dogs were treated so it's hard to recommend these movies but if you think you can handle it (and there's nothing violent mind you) then this here is one of the best.

... and even then it is a bit much, since many of these Dogville shorts were banned at the time of release, mainly because of the methods employed to get the dogs to do what they do - walking on their hind feet and moving their mouths to the narrated dialogue.

If you don't know already, the Dogville shorts were a series of one reelers made by MGM in the early 30s that show dogs acting out a shortened version of some melodrama. In most cases, these shorts were spoofs of actual MGM films of the time. There was "Dogway Melody", "Big Dog House", "Trader Hound", and "So Quiet on the Canine Front". This one is different in that it spoofs an entire genre of films of that time - the foreign legion films.

In this case the dogs are members of the French Foreign Legion, a place where people (dogs?) once joined up to avoid arrest and conviction in their home countries and often to swear off women. At the time, much of the foreign land under French control was in North Africa, thus the desert locale.

The film starts out with the legionnaires enjoying a newsreel that has lots of females in it. A few of the recruits walk out in disgust, sit around a table, and each has a tale of female betrayal that ended in them either committing a crime or just deciding to swear off women. There is one exception though. One dog ended up shooting his wife and her three friends while playing cards with them because of their incessant gossip and chattiness that drove him nuts. The end is predictable but cute.

This is not the best of the Dogville films, but overall they were successful and got Jules White and Zion Myers promoted to direct "human" films, starting with Buster Keaton's next film, and probably contributing to his increasing alcoholism with their autocratic ways.