Rant #2,254: It's a Laugh

How was your weekend?

Mine was a nice one.

My aunt visited on Saturday, and she is basically my connection to both the old world of my grandparents to the new world of the bohemian 1960s.

She has had an interesting life. She was an actress in 1960s New York, she later went into book publishing and then taught acting in Harlem, and has had a couple of famous graduates who cite her as one of the reasons that they became what they have become.

She has had some health problems in the past years, but when you want somebody to put you back on the right track, she is that person. She is a font of information, although she admits that she doesn't remember a lot of her life. I try to fill in the blanks when I can, and I think she appreciates that.

On Sunday, I took my son to work, picked him up from work, did a little shopping with my wife, and that was about it.

So on Sunday, I finally had time to do nothing, which can be constructive when you are at home. Sure, I did the laundry, but really, I had a good part of the day to simply chill out, which is exactly what I did.

I was looking for some movies to watch while I was chilling out, and I found a couple of interesting movies from the 1940s to watch, some fun films that I had not seen probably for 40 years or so.

But sit tight for the explanation of what I watched, because before I talk about the films in specific terms, I have to give you sort of a thumbnail background of these movies.

The Dead End Kids started life on Broadway, and the makeup of these actors mirrored somewhat the juvenile delinquent kids of the day--very ethnic, very first generation Americans, and very, very New York.

So you had the Irish kid, the Italian kid, the Jewish kid, and they all had attitude. Cops were their enemy, and the play, and subsequent movies featuring these actors, including Huntz Hall, replicated in Hollywood style, at least, some of the kids growing up in the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

The Dead End Kids, in various incarnations with various casts, kind of morphed into the East Side Kids, still a group of delinquents from that area of New York, but with a more comedic bent, and again, with an ever-changing cast in hand, this group ended up morphing into the Bowery Boys, who were still delinquents, but overaged versions of these supposed kids, and their movies were laugh-fests from the first frame to the last.

Of course, this is a thumbnail version of this story--which stretched from the early 1930s to the last Bowery Boys film in 1958--and you can look up the real story about how this franchise jumped from the Dead End Kids to the East Side Kids to the Bowery Boys--and how Leo Gorcey became one of the hardest working actors in Hollywood--elsewhere on the Web.

Anyway, running through the morphing from one group to another was another groups of kids, real kids who also helmed a popular movie franchise, and that is the Our Gang/Little Rascals kid actors, who have their own interesting story about how they morphed from one name to another,

Some of these kids found everlasting fame--like Jackie Cooper--and others found fame during a certain period, but pretty much faded off the face of the earth.

Then there were those that kind of were in-between fame and being unrecognizable.

Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer, for a time, paralleled Leo Gorcey's work schedule, really up to his unfortunate death in the late 1950s, which I am not going to chronicle too much here.

No, Alf or Alfie--the name he was called as he began to mature on screen into more supporting roles on both movies and television--appeared in a number of high-profile films during his afterlife from the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, but in small roles, including "It's a Wonderful Life," but he also had side gigs as a star performer in a number of very low-budget films.

Now here is what I am getting to, so get ready--

The Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys was such a popular franchise, as was the Our Gang/Little Rascals films, that there was going to be a number cf copycat series, trying to duplicate the fame--and probably fortune--of their predecessors.

For the Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys axis--and really, mostly the East Side Kids part of that equation--the Gas House Kids were created.

This group also grew up on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and yes, they were full of ethnic characters, including the Irish kid, the Italian kid and the Jewish kid, and yes, these supposed juvenile delinquents got into the same tangles with bad guys as the East Side Kids did.

The difference here is that Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall were not around, but Alfalfa and the likes of other former kid actors in the Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys and yes, the Our Gang/Little Rascals axis appeared in these copycat films, including the likes of Billy Halop and Tommy "Butch" Bond.

The Gas House Kids lasted all of three films compared to the nearly 70 films that the Dead End Kids/East Side Kids/Bowery Boys starred in and the more than 200 shorts of the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, but whatever the case, the three films of the Gas House Kids are fun to watch 70 years after the fact, if for nothing else than to see what happened to Alfalfa and Butch as they went through puberty and were in the mid-1940s good looking young actors.

The three films that I watched on Sunday--"The Gas House Kids," "The Gas House Kids Go West," and "The Gas House Kids Go To Hollywood"--are derivative, with the thinnest of plots, but they are fun to watch, have plenty of laughs, and a lot of action too.

Yes, just like the East Side Kids films did.

And I have to say, seeing Alfalfa in these films, and to a certain extent Butch, was a bit of a revelation.

We certainly all remember these two actors as pining for the love of Darla in the Our Gang/Little Rascals series, but we remember them as good kid actors.

Here, in these three films, they are much more grown up, and while the material isn't the best, the two do chew the scenery so to speak, and Alfalfa--who was known as that name specifically in the second two of the three Gas House Kids films, and was more of a supporting character in the first film--and the Jewish character with a different name!--really shines in the two films where he is the star of this series.

He shows an excellent comedic timing, and without the trademark cowlick, you can see that he was maturing as a comic performer in these movies, even with poor material to further his skills.

And as a sidenote, in 1956, Alfalfa finally appeared in a Bowery Boys' feature, "Dig That Uranium," so in a way, he had fully come full circle, from the Our Gang/Little Rascals to the Gas House Kids to the Bowery Boys.

Butch is the consummate performer. Still with that pug-nosed face and good skills, he was also better than this material, and he actually was the first film Jimmy Olsen in the Superman serials, appearing opposite Kirk Allyn and Noelle Neill.

If I remember correctly, Bond was in a number of films, but then went into the directing and producing end of the business, steadily working after a stint in the Navy, and it is interesting to note that he was a prop master on "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In."

He died in 2005.

Switzer's life was much more complicated. He worked steadily in movies and television through the late 1950s, and he also trained hunting dogs on the side, boasting many Hollywood people as his clientele, including Henry Fonda, I believe.

Anyway, in a dispute about payment, Switzer was fatally shot in January 1959. He was 37 years old.

That aside, I watched the three Gas House Kids movies with a bit of a fascination, because I had not seen these films in decades. I did remember one basketball bit in the best of the three films, "The Gas House Kids Go West," but little else.

It was fun seeing these then young male actors plying their trade years after their more familiar kid roles, and it has made me search for other vehicles that Switzer and Bond were in, and I am sure that I will find them.

So 70 years later, I can laugh at these movies, because the humor, although somewhat pedestrian, is still funny after all these years.

What more can one ask from a movie?

Even those films considered not that good when they came out can still pack a punch, and certainly, the three Gas House Kids films do just that.

You can find the three films on YouTube, and if you want to have some honest laughs, please check them out.