emdawgz1
Joined: 14 Mar 2006
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| Posted: Tue Nov 11, 2008 7:08 pm Post subject: Little Rascals... Complete DVD Collection |
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He man Woman Haters UNITE!!!!!
http://www.amazon.com/Little-Rascals-Complete-Collection/dp/B001CDFY5U/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1226430361&sr=8-1
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/11/movies/homevideo/11dvds.html?8dpc
November 11, 2008
New DVDs
It’s Spanky and Gang: Hold on to Your Beanies
By DAVE KEHR
W. C. Fields is said to have been the source of the show business maxim “Never work with children or animals.” “The Little Rascals: The Complete Collection,” a boxed set of eight DVDs from Genius Entertainment, offers approximately 20 hours’ worth of reasons Fields was right: nobody could compete.
Some 220 shorts were produced between 1922 and 1944 starring the “Our Gang” kids and their assorted animal companions. This set consists of the 80 sound films produced by Hal Roach and released to television in the 1950s as “The Little Rascals” — a name change made necessary because Roach had sold the “Our Gang” trademark to MGM in 1938. (MGM continued to produce “Our Gang” shorts, with diminishing results, until 1944.) For the generation that grew up with them, these 80 shorts are the essence of the series, and watching them is a Proustian experience, yielding wave after wave of memories.
But many of the “Our Gang” comedies are remarkable movies in their own right. Roach (1892-1992) was a pioneering independent producer of short comedies who also started the careers of Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chase and the team of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. According to Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann’s book, “The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang” (Three Rivers Press, 1992), Roach conceived the series while watching a group of children argue over bits of wood they’d taken from a lumberyard near his studio in Culver City, Calif.
Real kids, Roach believed, would be a richer source of comedy than the painted and pampered stage children usually seen in the movies, and drawing on recommendations from friends and studio employees, he put together a first cast of mostly nonprofessionals. After a couple of false starts, he also found a director, Robert F. McGowan, who could capture the natural behavior Roach had in mind.
McGowan would go on to direct most of the “Our Gang” films until he left Roach in 1933, reportedly exhausted by the stress of dealing with the dozens of child actors who passed through his care. But McGowan clearly had a profound rapport with children. He didn’t work from scripts, but instead guided the kids through structured improvisations, coaching them constantly as the cameras rolled (a technique no longer available when sound came in).
With their loose, loopy rhythms and start-and-stop pacing, the early-to-middle-period “Our Gang” films seem to resist the conventional constraints of storytelling. They shake off narrative in favor of a documentary-like texture — here are the real streets and storefronts, brand-new bungalows and refuse-strewn empty lots, of a still semi-rural Culver City — combined with strange, surrealist gags and bursts of anarchic, slapstick violence.
Luis Buńuel might have approved of a film like “Lazy Days” (1929), a pastoral reverie that consists largely of Allen Hoskins, known as Farina, one of the many African-American child actors featured in the series, dozing in an empty lot on a hot summer day. Bothered by an obviously unrehearsed bee that has landed on his nose, he asks his sister to swat it with a handy 2-by-4, with startlingly grotesque consequences.
The early sound shorts carry over many of the children from the silent films — husky Joe Cobb, the blond vamp Jean Darling, the eternally nonplussed Mary Ann Jackson — while gradually introducing new faces like Jackie Cooper and Dick Moore, who would both soon graduate to studio features. The cast most familiar from the television package coalesces around 1934: George McFarland (Spanky), Matthew Beard (Stymie), Carl Switzer (Alfalfa), Billie Thomas (Buckwheat), Darla Hood.
But it’s also around this time that the films become more professional and less appealing. McGowan was succeeded by two directors, Gus Meins and Gordon Douglas, who were far more technically adept than he was. (Douglas would go on to direct some of the toughest films noirs of the 1950s: “Between Midnight and Dawn,” “Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye”). But the location settings gradually shift to studio work; the situations become more structured; and the youngsters seem less spontaneous.
In the earlier films the Gang had no set social identity: they could be farm kids in one film, stuck in an orphanage in another, living in a Dickensian slum in a third (as in “Pups Is Pups,” McGowan’s masterpiece of 1930). As the decade wore on, however, they became more and more snugly middle class — a tendency that the MGM-produced films (not included here) reinforced to a fatal degree. When the series ended in 1944, little of McGowan’s spirit was left.
The jacket of the Genius set promises “fully remastered, restored and uncut” versions of the films, which is a slight exaggeration. With one small exception, the films are presented as they were originally released, with the racial stereotyping intact. And while the majority of the shorts do look as if they had been transferred from original negatives, at least a dozen, though, are taken from 16-millimeter prints issued to the home market, and they show obvious flaws. This may not be the ideal “Our Gang” collection, but it’s perfectly “otay.” (Genius Entertainment, $89.95, not rate
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