Tootie is annoying and disturbed!

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Disagree.

While I can see people being upset by this, you have to see she is still basically a darling child of good manners and kind disposition. I'd much rather have her around than the myriad total BRATS that infest the world today (especially movies/TV).

As for the trolley threat, yes, I'd be a bit upset about that. I can see that more than anything. But I direct you back to paragraph 1. The girl would get her punishment and it would be over with.


As for more historical context, perhaps you have to put yourself back in 1900. There were still tons of deaths happening to every age, much due to illness as well as dangerous situations. People saw death a whole lot, while now we deny it happens and try to hide it (we don't put dead people in the house any more), because we're so spoiled with great health/fixes, and less intense work.

This girl may have encountered plenty of deaths and just had a fixation on it to work it out in her mind.

Personally, the Halloween scene is one of my favorites! I did think the lack of adult supervision during the bonfire was a little hard to understand, after all, fire is fire, regardless of what year it is! I loved the flour-in-the-face scene "Tootie" does to impress the older kids!! And I think Margaret O'Brien's sugar-sweet, over-the-top-precocious-child act was, like it or not, fitting for a lighthearted, saccharine-sweet film such as this was.

I'm not too fond of Tootie's charactor either. If she didn't talk of burying her dead dolls (who died of diseases)in the back yard and placing a stuffed dress on the trolley tracks, she would have been cute.

If you take her too seriously, she is a little on the wacky side. Even for a kid. Within the movie, though, I thought she was quite entertaining.

As to the comments about the, um, "rambunctious" behavior of the kids, I think it probably arises from a mismatch between what's shown in the movie and a prevailing idealized and highly inaccurate view of history which places the advent of misbehavior in the 1960s.

I wonder what the people who freaked out over the Hallowe'en sequence thought of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?

I wouldn't take it all too seriously. This is a musical, intended for mindless entertainment. If Tootie was my real life child and her obsession with death went on for too long, it would certainly give me pause. However, all Tootie's talk of burying her dead dolls and such was funny in its bizarre way.

There were a few times when this little girl needed to seriously be taken to task over her behaviour, notably the Halloween trolley stunt, endangering people and getting poor John into trouble with Esther. I was rather annoyed at Tootie getting away with that one, I admit! It also irked me when she was praised as the bravest of them all and cast as so cute when she floured the supposed 'meanest man in town' and shouted that she hated him! I definitely saw this poor man as the victim of the piece!

However, Tootie's antics were not intended as a lesson in child rearing practices or deviant childhood behaviour, merely for amusing audiences and providing a sort of occasional 'gruesome relief' to this generally saccharine (though quite enjoyable) movie!

Boy, I'm all over the map on this one.

First of all, I fall in the anti-Tootie camp. We're supposed to adore her and regard her as a mascot, as her family does -- she's played by Margaret O'Brien, after all -- but I never took to the character.

Secondly, I think the family was right to be shocked and angry that Tootie and Agnes had played such a dangerous trick, but they let them get away with it because in the end no one was hurt.

Thirdly, the posters above are right that in real life Tootie and Agnes would have been severely punished (I have no idea what the book says about this). I suspect some of the participants in this thread are simply too young to have grown up in a society where corporal punishment was accepted and parenting was strict.

Then again, it's a rare movie or TV show that shows a kid facing the consequences of misbehavior! That's entertainment.

As for the Halloween scenes, on first viewing I found them creepy, but now they seem rather innocent. Some of us view Halloween as a big societal safety valve in which everyone indulges his/her dark side, and that's what the kids are doing. It's their one evening a year to be little hooligans, and the adults are simply playing along.

And Halloween was traditionally for pranks, some of them harmful. My father said that back in the '30s the kids would fill stockings full of ashes and hit people with them, and it was like getting hit with a sock full of rocks.

First rule of movie-going: never confuse the actor with his role.

I think the character of "Tootie" is most annoying too, but so were a lot of little girls in those days - was it something deliberate? I'm thinking of the daughter in "It Happened to Jane" (a most precocious madam); the chief of police's daughter in the 1945 version of "State Fair" and Amaryllis in "The Music Man". About Halloween - when I was a child in Ireland (c.1950s) we used to have two major bonfires in our village - the competition being to see who could make the most smoke! Nobody's tyres were safe.