Call Me Stormy

The Terror of Tiny Town

This week’s Trillion $ Movie, The Terror of Tiny Town, was billed as Hollywood’s first all-midget, musical Western upon its release in 1938. To this day, it remains the one and only example of the genre. Tiny Town came out under the imprimatur of the low-budget Spectrum Pictures Corporation, but Columbia Pictures subsequently picked up the title to fulfill the production quota it had promised to exhibitors.

Producer Jed Buell bought into the concept, having made Hollywood’s first all-black, feature-length Western, Harlem on the Prairie, in 1937. After deciding to cast only midgets for his next novelty picture, he assembled a troupe of players that reportedly boasted an average height of 3 feet, 8 inches. Most of them had never appeared in a movie before, which is glaringly obvious from their clumsy and stilted line readings. But the experience would serve them well, as a year later, many of these same cast members got the call from MGM to flesh out roles as Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz.

Except for the pint-sized players, Tiny Town covers familiar Western turf. A gang of cattle rustlers, bushwhackers and murderers has pitted ranchers against each other in a Dry Gulch town. But the black-hatted villains don’t reckon on the heroics of Buck Lawson, a working cowpoke who rides around on a Shetland pony, lassos calves and easily saunters into the local saloon by walking under the swinging doors. Buck has a star-crossed love interest, and also inspires palpitations on the part of barroom chanteuse Nita, a sultry heartthrob inspired by Marlene Dietrich.

This isn’t a film that will set the prairie on fire, but it’s certainly distinctive, short (pun intended), moves quickly and has enough comic interludes (including a singalong with a penguin) to justify its marketing as “a rollickin’, rootin’, tootin’, shootin’ drama of the great outdoors.” In a week when the news has been dominated by debate over a politically incorrect, low-budget movie on YouTube, it’s rather apropos to resurrect The Terror of Tiny Town and celebrate the God-given, American freedom to create offensively bad movies. Enjoy and return next Friday for another Trillion $ Movie.