SPOILER INCLUDED!
This Vitaphone short, in (really!) glorious Technicolor, allows pint-size Sybil Jason to bring peace to South Africa. Sybil's brother, an English officer, is in love with Boer girl Jane Wyman, naturally disapproved by her family. The Boers and English are primed for conflict with one another, and the Zulus are on the warpath. But when Cetshwayo's warriors capture Jane, the Boers and Brits have to join forces to rescue her. The moral: We really can work together and share this land after we take it away from the people to whom it belongs! So let's all trek off into the sunset while singing a choral anthem. Talk about a happy ending.
Performances are adequate, and Sybil is not as aggressively perky as in her earlier short "The Captain's Kid" (a 2-reel version of "Wee Willie Winkie" in which she tries to out-Temple Shirley, and which I just watched a couple of hours earlier on Turner Movies, where this featurette also appeared this evening). The wagons look pretty authentic but the canoes used by the Zulus appear to be left over from the 1935 "Last of the Mohicans." The overall ambience is basically that of a musical western, and the black performers are used as if they were Indians in lowbudget sagebrusher -- they're here to menace and then to be gunned down. In its defense, there was still an Empire at the time and who knew it wasn't going to last forever? Odds are the Iraqi War movies will look just as foolish 65 years down the line.
This Vitaphone short, in (really!) glorious Technicolor, allows pint-size Sybil Jason to bring peace to South Africa. Sybil's brother, an English officer, is in love with Boer girl Jane Wyman, naturally disapproved by her family. The Boers and English are primed for conflict with one another, and the Zulus are on the warpath. But when Cetshwayo's warriors capture Jane, the Boers and Brits have to join forces to rescue her. The moral: We really can work together and share this land after we take it away from the people to whom it belongs! So let's all trek off into the sunset while singing a choral anthem. Talk about a happy ending.
Performances are adequate, and Sybil is not as aggressively perky as in her earlier short "The Captain's Kid" (a 2-reel version of "Wee Willie Winkie" in which she tries to out-Temple Shirley, and which I just watched a couple of hours earlier on Turner Movies, where this featurette also appeared this evening). The wagons look pretty authentic but the canoes used by the Zulus appear to be left over from the 1935 "Last of the Mohicans." The overall ambience is basically that of a musical western, and the black performers are used as if they were Indians in lowbudget sagebrusher -- they're here to menace and then to be gunned down. In its defense, there was still an Empire at the time and who knew it wasn't going to last forever? Odds are the Iraqi War movies will look just as foolish 65 years down the line.