The Terror of Tiny Town (1938)

There are three points in time.  There is the past, the present, and the future.  The past is everything you have done up to this point.  Your trials, tribulations, mistakes, failures, and successes.  The happy moments, the sad, and everything in between.  The present is the person that you are based on what happened in the past and how you let those events shape you.  Then there is the future, which is what you want to make it.  There are unavoidable variables such as death, but for the most part you can shape your future.  You can use your past and who you are in the present as a way to nudge yourself down a certain path.

Movies are the same way.  The people making them see their past while making their present work and try to course correct to make a better future.  That could be in the case of making long-lasting franchises.  What I want to talk about, though, is the cultural sensitivity shown through movies as they’ve progressed over their 130ish year existence.

Take, for example, this week’s movie The Terror of Tiny Town.  It was a western released in 1938 that boasted itself as the first film produced with “an all midget cast.”  Buck Lawson (Billy Curtis) was a farm boy who was being tormented by Bat Haines (Little Billy Rhodes), a gang leader.  The two batted heads over robberies, cattle, and Nancy Preston (Yvonne Moray).  It all came to a head in a cabin where there was burning dynamite.

That story might not seem like a big deal.  It’s the basic western story.  White hat versus black hat.  If not literally wearing the hats, the archetypes of each character.  That’s not why The Terror of Tiny Town was included in the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  As has already been mentioned, there are three stages of time: the past, the present, and the future.  The past is necessary to understand the present and the future.  The Terror of Tiny Town is the sketchy past of Hollywood that led to the current okay present.

The Terror of Tiny Town treated the cast like a joke.  The entire time, their height was the butt of sight gags.  They were riding Shetland ponies around because they were small enough for the stature of the actors.  There were jokes about the actors walking under swinging saloon doors instead of pushing them open.  They would walk under fences instead of going around or hopping over.  Everything was made into a joke about how small they were.

This kind of treatment wouldn’t fly so much today.  It took a while for that to be the case, but things have slowly come around to people being respectful of the varied heights that we all are.  Through the 1980s, there were small characters like the Ewoks, Willow, and Howard the Duck where their size wasn’t the sole reason for the movie to exist.  They weren’t there to be made a mockery of.  There were still movies where small people were a joke.  Look at pretty much anything with Santa and his elves up until even Jingle All the Way in 1996.  The elves tended to be there for jokes about how small they were and how easy it was to toss them aside.

The tide started shifting much more recently.  The Wolf of Wall Street used a small person for a joke, but they weren’t the joke in themselves.  The tossing scene that was featured in the movie was a joke about how horrible Jordan Belfort and his cohorts were.  They wanted to throw someone small because they thought it was funny.  The audience is supposed to know it’s a horrible thing and laugh at how horrifying it is that these people would think it’s a good idea.

This isn’t the only issue with older films that has slowly become something that can’t be done in movies.  The Birth of a Nation was about the KKK being the saviors of the south.  Black people were portrayed by white people in blackface and were characterized as dumb, sexual predators always trying to get the women in the area.  None of this would fly today.  The institutional racism and sympathy for the KKK that the movie showcased has since been, rightfully, considered a bad thing.  Blackface is an insult to black people.  It’s a mockery of them by the white people who were suppressing them for so long (and in some cases, still are).  The KKK should never be applauded because they’re basically for genocide.

The rise of black filmmakers in American cinema has really helped to curb a lot of this treatment in movies.  That’s not to say that America has completely improved.  Both of these ideas came together in last year’s great film BlacKkKlansman.  Some people might write me off at this point because I’m a white guy quickly writing about racial issues while not really experiencing them all that much.  I get that.  All I want to say here is that Spike Lee has been making films for black people for over three decades now.  And he may have made more important, impactful movies like Do the Right Thing in his past.  But BlacKkKlansman managed to take a story about a black man in the 1970s, add Spike Lee’s signature style, and infuse some of the present day issues to make an important statement about the current state of the USA.  It’s a long way from what The Birth of a Nation was 100 years earlier.  There’s still a lot of work to be done, too, as Charlottesville has shown us.

Then there’s the issue of the way women have been treated in the film industry.  It’s not great, Bob.  There are way too few movies about women when compared to movies about men.  There are men in most of the roles of power in the industry, which leads to more male driven content.  Think of it like this.  To properly understand someone, you need to walk a mile in their shoes.  If there is a cis male in charge of writing a story about a woman, he’s never going to understand what she goes through on a day to day basis.

That’s not the worst of it though.  For a long time, men in America treated women like property.  They had a woman at home taking care of the kids, cooking, and cleaning.  When he wanted sex, he would get it.  She was his woman, and that was that.  The mentality of treating women like property would make its way into the stories that were told in movies.  Women were romantic interests meant to be earned by the men.  A male character would do something to get the woman.  He would defeat a romantic rival.  He would save the woman from a monster.  Whatever the conflict was, at the end, she was expected to be with him.  Things are still that way in many films.  That’s why the Bechdel Test exists.  It’s a means to check how well done the female representation in any given movie is.  Are there no women?  Failed.  Is there only one woman?  Failed.  Are there multiple women and they only talk about the men?  Failed.  If there are multiple male characters who talk about things other than the women they want, why can’t there be female characters that don’t talk about the men in their lives?

Much like with the racism that has been a part of the movie industry, more female artists will help to alleviate the problems with how women are portrayed.  People like Ava Duvernay, Lynn Ramsay, Kathryn Bigelow, Sofia Coppola, and Patty Jenkins are helping pave the way for better female representation both in front of and behind the camera.  Wonder Woman was as successful as it was because of the women involved.  Zero Dark Thirty had a strong female lead partially due to a woman at the helm.  Hopefully, they inspire more women to come into the business and make stories that bring new points of view.

My intention with this post was to use the injustice that The Terror of Tiny Town did to its actors as a springboard to a more personal story.  What it ended up being, though, was me, an average height white male speaking of the injustices that everyone else experiences.  And much like I said earlier, you need to walk a mile in others’ shoes to understand what they go through.  I haven’t lived the lives of the people I’ve been writing about in this post.  I can’t say how much their lives have improved or fallen apart over the years due to these issues.  I can say that movies have gotten better about not being disrespectful to people.  There are still major issues with the people who make the movies, sure.  But the content has slowly been getting more culturally sensitive.  For the most part, that is.  Characters who aren’t cis white men have been improving.  Watching movies is becoming more exciting with these other stories being told.

The past in movies can be troubling to look at.  Racism, sexism, and all other forms of discrimination ran rampant for the longest time.  Being able to look back at it has made the present an interesting place as people are trying to course correct.  Looking into the future, there will be more variety in stories and storytellers.  They won’t be 95% cis white men.  Things are starting to change.  It’s an exciting future to look forward to as new voices come to the forefront.  I’m looking forward to it.  I hope you are too.

I hope you’re looking forward to these notes, as well:

• Howard the Duck (week 75) and Jingle All the Way (week 160) were mentioned in this post.
• Have you seen The Terror of Tiny Town?  How do you think the film industry has grown with these issues?  Let me know in the comments.
• Twitter and the comments are good places to let me know about what movies I should be checking out for the Sunday “Bad” Movies.  I’m always looking for suggestions about what to watch.
• There’s an Instagram account for the Sunday “Bad”Movies.  Follow it if you want.  I give updates about the posts and that kind of stuff, so you’ll be able to keep up with things there.
• I also have a Snapchat.  It’s not blog specific, but I do share clips of the bad movies I watch there.  Add me (jurassicgriffin) if that sounds like something you want.
• Next week is the week I’ve been looking forward to for some time.  I’ll be heading back to a franchise that has been a big part of the Sunday “Bad” Movies since the first year.  The Marine 6: Close Quarters came out late last year, and I’m obviously going to catch up with it.  Every other movie in the franchise was featured in the blog.  So, come back next Sunday to see what I have written about it.  See you then.