tadpole-596-918256 Review of School's Out

School's Out (1930)

From the mouths of babes (please excuse the cliche) . . .

[6/10 · 19 December 2017]

. . . comes the most direct Honesty. By this, people mean that a film offering focusing upon children, such as MGM's SCHOOL'S OUT, may give a more direct opportunity for The Truth "to out" than a bladder-busting four-hour feature film directed at adults (such as MGM's own purely mendacious GONE WITH THE WIND). Note that SCHOOL'S OUT boasts a running time of less than 21 minutes, to boot. Another way in which SCHOOL'S OUT is far superior to GWTW is in it's franker treatment of male\female interactions. Zero is about the right score for MGM's so-called "epic picture's" faithfulness to its source material (a hernia-inducing novel allegedly written as the sole lifetime literary output of someone named Ms. Mitchell or something). In the movie version of GWTW, all but one of "Scarlett O'Hara's" kids turn up MIA (I could use the "A-Word" in conjunction with them, but I do not want to get anyone's nose out of joint). Surely "Our Gang" producer Hal Roach had a philosophy along the lines of THERE'S ALWAYS ROOM FOR ONE MORE when it came time to film HIS live-action theatrical shorts, however. Good for Hal, I say. As for an example of how SCHOOL'S OUT beats GWTW for frankness, one only need to listen to Wheezer crowing about how Jackie Cooper can now sleep with Ms. Crabtree herself, rather than having young Jackie keeping his little brother up all night by mauling HIM as a surrogate for their fresh young instructor. Good folks may take exception to Ms. C.'s brother splashing all the young primary school girls such as Mary and Dorothy when he dives Au Naturel into the pond adjacent to his "sister's" school for the purpose of Skinny-Dipping DURING SCHOOL HOURS! "Goodness, such a thing would NEVER be tolerated in America," they might object. Either such naysayers would be oblivious to the fact that the Our Gang series constitutes Mr. Roach's long-running string of documentary shorts exposing the problem of Juvenile Delinquency in Canadia, or they simply do not care for such geographical distinctions. Delinquent or not, Our Gang's always ready to come and bail viewers out of their doldrums. Maybe the character of Big Jack from School's out REALLY is Ms. Crabtree's "brother," and maybe all the little female students somehow were not exposed to his junk. Examination of all 15 statements or themes included in SCHOOL'S OUT should reveal a lot of Truth in any case.