The Smile Wins

This Our Gang silent short centers around Farina, a boy who can still smile even when life is incredibly difficult. He and his sister are supported by their mother, a laundress. The mother becomes ill and things become even tougher for Farina. The gang initially harasses Farina and one of the gang pours mud into the the packages of clean laundry that Farina is on his way to deliver to a customer. The first gang member to befriend Farina is Joe Cobb and when the others learn what dire straights Farina and his family are in, they all pitch in to help him. Even Petey the dog gets into the act. A delightful short that I was fortunate enough to see a great print of at the 2013 Syracuse Cinefest.

This Hal Roach comedy short, The Smile Wins, is the sixty-sixth in the "Our Gang/Little Rascals" series. If anyone reading this is familiar with the way this review begins, you must have read my comments on this site of the other Our Gang comedies I wrote under my previous username tavm. Anyway, in this one, Farina is trying to help his mother with her laundry business as she's quite sick and the landlord wants his money in two days or they'll, along with Farina's sister, be evicted. The rest of the gang, except for Joe, don't seem to like him for some reason but after one of them messing the laundry gets Farina crying and telling his story, the gang do an about turn and get vegetables from their pantries as well as drill for oil. I'll stop there and just say this was quite touching with some good gags in the right places. So that's a recommendation of The Smile Wins. Oh, and Farina's sister is played by his actual one Janine and that's their real mother Florence. P. S. This turned out to be the final one of the series distributed by the Pathe Exchange. Hal Roach told Leonard Maltin and Richard W. Bann, authors of "The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang", why: "The management was just disgraceful. I never saw a company do so many things so wrong so fast. For instance, they made a contract with Mack Sennett to make as many pictures as I was making. The trouble was that the theatres didn't want to buy too many pictures from one distributor. So the result was Pathe'd sell my pictures to one theatre and sell Sennett's to another: Mack and I were cutting each other's business in half." I'll reveal what studio Roach picked as his next distributor when I review the following available Our Gang short to exist: The Old Wallop.

my folks had this as a 16mm 1-reel excerpt titled "oily rich". they used to show it on a bedsheet long before I was born.I still have the reel and would sure like to know if it was ever put on videotape.the celluloid is very old and I don't think it would survive transfer.I saw it as a youngster and the reel was old then. it was hilarious.