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Stan and Ollie are a couple of gypsies. Their band has camped on the grounds of Count Arnheim, who hates gypsies. He has the gypsy chief, Devilshoof, arrested and flogged. His lover, and incidentally Ollie's wife (yes there is a bit of hanky-panky going on here), takes revenge by kidnapping Arnheim's baby daughter. She tells Ollie the baby is his daughter and Ollie actually believes her (he never was particularly smart). She then runs away with Devilshoof.Years later (the baby is now a beautiful young lady) the band of gypsies again camps on Count Arnheim's grounds (will they never learn?). Arnheim arrests Ollie's "daughter" for trespassing and orders her to be flogged. Eventually Count Arnheim recognizes that the girl is really his own daughter and releases her, but not before the boys spend some time in Arnheim's torture chamber. Stan and Babe made four "costume" movies; The Rogue Song in which the boys appeared only as comedy relief in cameo appearances, The Devil's Brother, a burlesque of Fra Diavolo, a comic opera by Daniel F. Auber, Babes In Toyland from the musical review by Victor Herbert and The Bohemian Girl from the opera by Michael Balfe. Although both Stan and Babe came to consider these costume roles to be among their best, they did not think so at first. In 1932, while talking to a reporter, Babe is quoted as saying, "In Hollywood they want to dress us up for our next film, but we're not having any -no highbrow stuff for us." That "next film" was to be The Devil's Brother. Plans for The Bohemian Girl started as early as July 1934, before Babes in Toyland was completed. Work was started on the screen play, but by the end of the year the plans were shelved. The following year it was revived and a lengthy script was produced, much of which never made it to the screen. The best-remembered scene in The Bohemian Girl was that in which Stan is trying to bottle some wine, using a rubber hose to siphon wine from the barrel. Another famous scene is that in which the boys rob a foppish nobleman using the line "Your eyes are the windows of your soul, and to know all, I must touch them." Still another scene is that in which Arline, the Bohemian girl, sings the beautiful song, "I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls." On December 16, 1935, only days after the first previews of The Bohemian Girl, Thelma Todd's body was discovered slumped over the steering wheel of her car in a locked garage. Although the verdict was accidental death due to carbon monoxide poisoning, many unanswered questions arose. Most of her scenes in The Bohemian Girl were removed, leaving only one scene in which she sings a lively song, "The True Song of the Gypsy." She was only 30 years old.
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