The Terror of Tiny Town (Sam Newfield, 1938)

[L.A.]

The Terror of Tiny Town (Sam Newfield, 1938)

This most likely has many DVD editions available. Which DVD is passable?

[Tuco]

My God, but you're a brave man! I only lasted 5 minutes into this one. Rumored to be part of a Criterion box set on the complete oeuvre of Sam Newfield...

[jindianajonz]

Rumored to be part of a Criterion box set on the complete oeuvre of Sam Newfield...

I'm going to go out on a very short limb and assume this is pure sarcasm?

[HerrSchreck]

You must be crazy to make fun of this!!! I aDORE this film-- Hollywood's first All-Midget Musical. It's positively hilarious, and meant to be so.

And a Sam Newfield box isn't the worst thing one could come up with. He was a backbone of B-fare over at PRC, with some notable Zucco titles under his belt.

As for which edition is best, I have the old Alpha release, which is actually--for Alpha--pretty clear and passable.

[didi-5]

It gets regular TV showings here on one of the more obscure Sky channels. I've watched it twice. It's very ... odd. An entire cast of midgets, with songs, and a bit of horse-riding and gun-play. I can't make my mind up whether it is done with affection or just exploiting its cast.

[HerrSchreck]

I can't make my mind up whether it is done with affection or just exploiting its cast.

Listen. Film is exploitation. Actors exploit themselves desperately till their veins burst--funny looking guys play up their bad looks, beautiful people exploit their good looks, peculiar people look at their peculiarities and see an opportunity for fame and renumeration so they exploit their peculiarities. If a midget goes to Hollywood in the 1930's seeking work, he pretty much knows he's going to be exploited for being a midget. He really doesn't have a shot to understudy Lawrence Olivier or Burton as Hamlet, no matter how good his chops.

How would a film like The Terror of Tinytown, Hollywood's first All-Midget Musical NOT be exploiting it's cast? Would that require that the director be casting a standard musical-western first and foremost, and wind up with a cast full of midgets strictly because they accidentally and coincidentally all turned out to be the very best among all the applicants that screen tested for every part?

Of COURSE he's exploiting the cast. But I have no doubt that the little people on that set were probably more at ease and at home on that set, cast wise, than on any other movie. One film in history where they are completely normal within the strictutures of the cast, where they didn't have to feel like the oddball sitting in the cafeteria where nobody else there in that hall full of studio egos is like them.

It's just a silly little fun movie that gave the midgets a chance to humorously run around and goof around and pretend the entire world was their size. There's no malevolent exploitation anywhere to be found.

[Gregory]

I'd say a mixture of affection and exploitation to some degree, but mostly exploitation of the kind Schreck is talking about—actors marketing their attributes. Making spectacles out of any really unusual human form goes back to the earliest freak shows, fairs, and exhibitions. Little people had become clowns and jesters as far back as the Middle Ages, and I think their appeal in a film like Terror of Tiny Town isn't that the little people are freakish but rather that they're cute, but maybe for some viewers also just like normal adults with whom we can identify.

The cuteness angle was so central to how displays of little people were presented and seen that it was pretty difficult to avoid that kind of built-in condescension and exploitation to one degree or another. That's where I think a film like Tiny Town may seem problematic to people today. It was not only just meant to be funny; I think it was also capitalizing on the appeal of little people being just adorable. This tendency to see little people as being just like cute child performers had been shown eloquently several years earlier in Freaks, in Cleopatra's horrible infantilizing treatment of Hans. The Terror of Tiny Town was meant to be a novelty, so it's less obvious that the little people who starred in the film were asserting their dignity than Freaks's Hans and Frieda were. But although from today's perspective it's common to understand (especially) freak shows, Tiny Town, or possibly even The Wizard of Oz's Munchkins as exploiting and degrading the people on display, I think for many such performers working in that kind of entertainment granted a degree of independence that would have been hard to find elsewhere. It offered opportunities for fame and fortune, and a way to earn an honest living, even though some of it can look problematic to many of us in the present-day context. But so many films from other eras are problematic like that, in one way or another, that it's something we're all used to dealing with, or ignoring.

EDIT: Just to underscore how different the contexts in which little people had to get through life with some dignity, less than a century ago vs. today, consider that the case of this film had been a part of a troupe called Singer's Midgets. Singer had bought the little people from their families, who considered them to be outcasts they'd rather just wash their hands of. And, being unable to do manual labor in a world made for much larger people, I imagine in many cases they had to become entertainers. I mean, there is still an extreme shortage of dignified roles for someone like Tony Cox, but it really is a different world today.