Boxing Gloves

This is a fairly entertaining early sound Our Gang short. Both Joe and Chubby are easy to like in this one, as is the underrated and under appreciated Farina. Joe's face of anger as his hair gets messed up is priceless. The actual boxing sequence between the two "heavyweights" does contain a few nice chuckles. The film is more a sound "hybrid" as opposed to a full all-talking short. This is what hurts the film in the end. The audio track shows the ravages of time and there are long segments of complete silence that hampers the overall effect. Still, it's hard to find real fault with this or any of the Our Gang series but when stacked up against other shorts from the series, it's serviceable at best.

Sometimes I am shocked how bad (i.e. "Harry, Joe, Wheezer") or how good (i.e. "Farina, Chubby, etc.") some of these young kids are in the acting department. In these early Our Gang shorts, a few got a little famous, though, and no more more than the kid who makes his debut here in a cameo role: Jackie Cooper.

Cooper plays a paying customer to a fight being promoted by Farina and Harry with the boxers being Wheezer and Beezer - two little guys who have no clue what do to in the ring and don't have their heart into it anyway. When Cooper demands his "money" back, Farina asks, "Whad'ya expect? Jack Dempsey and Benny Leonard?" In the next Our Gang short, Cooper is part of the group but I don't think they explained how that happened.

Anyway, the promoters - speaking of Dempsey - need some heavyweight boxers to draw a crowd, so they get Chubby and Joe after Farina spot the two fighting over a girl. He puts their temporary animosity to good (and funny) use! The boxing match between the two heavy kids takes up almost the entire second half of the film is pretty comical. Check out the misspelled signs, too, which are cute.

The odd thing is that the sound goes off a number of times when the camera pans back for a crowd shot. Only the closeups then does the sound return. Since this was 1929 and the beginning of "talkies," crowd noise was obviously too difficult to handle here.

Still, the short provides a number of good slapstick comedy scenes, something you always got with old-time comedies featuring boxing.

This Hal Roach comedy short, Boxing Gloves, is the ninety-first in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series and the third talkie. A partial remake of the silent The Champeen, this one has Joe and Chubby fighting over Jean when she asks for a soda pop which gives Farina an idea to put them in the boxing ring. I'll stop there and just say that while the beginning with the repeat of the soda pop running back and forth gag from the previous short I mentioned was again handled well, the boxing scenes aren't as funny especially when those scenes are absent of any crowd noise since this was a part talkie at best. I guess some of the technical problems of doing sound pictures hadn't been ironed out yet. Of note is the fact this marked the first series appearance of one Jackie Coooper who's at the beginning demanding his money back because of the initial fight between toddler Wheezer and another one his age which is lackluster. Jackie will eventually take the leading role in the gang. Directed by Anthony Mack, Robert McGowan's nephew. On that note, Boxing Gloves is still worth a look for any Our Gang completists out there.

Another reviewer indicated that this was a curiosity, and it sure was! When I first watched "Boxing Gloves," I turned the sound way up on the tv, thinking that there might be something wrong with the soundtrack. The large stretches without sound during what surely would have been very noisy sequences are very unsettling...some clever director should make use of this technique! A very entertaining episode.

This is the fourth Little Rascals sound film. It is very short, at only 17 minutes. Unfortunately, about half the sound track is missing, so that as the film is cut, we go from sound scenes to silent scenes and back and forth like that. Farina is trying to make some money out of staging a boxing match for which he can charge admission. Farina sees Joe and Chubby fighting rather feebly over a girl and decides that they would be good in the ring. The only problem is that 'Joe doesn't get mad and Chubby is scared', so something must be done to get them fighting properly. They agree to go into the ring. But Farina has discovered a secret about Joe which is that Joe is very vain about his hair, which must always be neatly combed. As Joe says: 'There ain't nothing that gets be madder than havin' my hair mussed.' So as the fight proceeds, Farina arranges for Joe to get his hair mussed up, which drive him wild and a savage fight then takes place. Although they wear heavily padded gloves, the kids are doing their own fighting and they whack each other with terrible force over and over again, and nowadays nothing like that would be allowed. But it was 1929 and 'everything goes'. At one point they knock each other out simultaneously. During all of this, Mary Ann keeps trying to sneak in to see the fight and being thrown out, but disguises herself as a boy and even wears a false moustache at one point. She ends up being able to see the fight, and Pete the Dog does as well. (He looks really interested in it.) Some of the regulars do not appear in this film, and a large extra cast of boys appears in the film as the audience and as troublemakers because they are older. All the long shots of the roaring audience of boys have lost their sound. The directorial credit for this film says it was directed by Anthony Mack 'under the supervision of Robert A. McGowan', but as IMDb makes clear, Anthony Mack was a pseudonym for McGowan for numerous Little Rascals films. I must confess myself puzzled as to why it was necessary for McGowan to pretend to be somebody else under the supervision of himself. Perhaps someone cleverer than myself knows the answer to this mystery. This is a rather disappointing Little Rascals film, and seems a bit half-hearted.