Review of March of the Wooden Soldiers

This musical-fantasy-nursery-rhyme concoction seems to be a sentimental favourite for lots of people, but it just doesn't stand up. It's a live-action film that imitates cartoons, and the cartoons are better in most ways. The problem here is the forced jollity of the conceit, a romp through story-book land. The actors are wooden, the writing is dismal, and not even the scary Crooked Man scenery-chewing of Henry Brandon as Silas Barnaby or the good-natured fumbling of Laurel and Hardy can save it. Perhaps the nadir is the climactic battle scene between Old King Cole's people, helped by a platoon of tall wooden soldiers built mistakenly by Laurel and Hardy, chasing Barnaby and his ogre henchmen—they're all wearing shaggy brown Dr. Denton pajamas and ugly masks and little horns—into the river. Every once in a while one Tom-Tom the Piper's Son or Little Bo-Peep burst into song. I wish they wouldn't. There are some exceptionally ugly puppets, the three rubber-headed little pigs, a fiddling cat, and a pesky mouse that looks a lot like Mickey if he had been carved from a block of soap and rolled around the sound stage by some obscure magnetic force. There are some good lines and some good bits of business—when Stan pretends to be Bo-Peep and gets married to Barnaby, Ollie is ready to leave him there because, after all, he is married—but nothing can save this well-intentioned, badly written, feverishly energetic, garish movie. A minority opinion, but nearly any other film version of the world of children's literature is heaps better than this.