|
 Alfalfa's
baby brother never stops crying. So Alf endeavors to trade the little
nuisance for a quieter model. The "infant" he receives in exchange
turns out to be "Light-Fingered Lester," a midget who dresses in baby
clothes to fool his pickpocket victims. Fleeing from the police,
Lester plays along with the gang, until later at Alfalfa's home when he
cracks open a bottle of beer and begins taunting the kids. Before the
gang can reverse matters, the police break in and haul the whole bunch to
the courthouse. The judge can see the kids aren't part of Lester's
mob, but he decides to place them on probation and teach them a lesson for
having such foolish notions about baby brothers. If this ever happens
again, the judge warns, "I'll sentence you with every sentence in the book."
Woefully thin stuff, Tiny Troubles
suffers from many troubles. A shapeless reworking of the central
idea in Bouncing Babies, it represents the first really bad MGM
Our Gang short. Somehow the
production staff expected an audience to swallow the idea that
eleven-year-old Alfalfa and ten-year-old Spanky couldn't tell the
difference between an infant and a midget dressed as one. If this
was supposed to be funny, it isn't. Embarrassment displaces
laughter.
Midget Jerry Maren appeared that same year in
At
the Circus with
The Marx Brothers, and as a Munchkin in
The Wizard of Oz. He was still active in television through
the 1970's.
Cinematographer Alfred Gilks later won an Academy Award
for color camerawork on MGM's
An American in Paris (1951), reemphasizing the fact that no matter
how cold and wooden the performances and scripts might become, the
studio's
Our Gang shorts always boasted the finest production money could
buy. But no one at MGM really cared about the films, and no
Metro budget ever allowed for that. |
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