Juke Girl

Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month back in June, and I recorded several of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before. I finally got around to watching the last of them, Juke Girl.

Sheridan is nominally the star here, and certainly the title refers to her, but she's really not the star, as that honor goes to Ronald Reagan. Reagan plays Steve Talbot, a Kansas-born farmer who for the last several years has been doing the seasonal labor thing together with his buddy Danny Frazier (Richard Whorf). As the movie opens, they're walking toward the town of Cat-Tail, FL, which is the farming capital of Florida considering how many thousands of seasonal workers show up.

As for Sheridan, she plays Lola Mears, who works as a singer/"entertainer" at one of the "juke joint" bars that pop up in town to service all those migrant workers. Lola, like Steve and Danny, is itinerant, and the juke girl life is all she seems to know, except that at least she'll be able to get a similar job no matter where she goes.

Cat-Tail is one of those towns run by a company, in this case the Madden Packing company. Henry Madden (Gene Lockhart) owns the one packing place in town, and uses this to offer all of the farmers lousy prices on their crops, which really ticks off people like Nick Garcos (George Tobias). He's planning on taking his tomatoes up to Atlanta himself, but the truck he has is lousy and there's no way the tires are going to make it all the way to Atlanta, as Steve tells him. This forms an alliance between Steve and Nick.

Danny, meanwhile, has decided that working for Madden is the best way for him to get ahead, never mind the fact that Madden isn't just a hard-nosed businessman, but one who has no compunction about bending the law to get his way, considering the way his henchmen destroy Nick's tomatoes. Danny seems more ready to settle down and compromise, unlike the more idealistic Steve.

Nick has a crop of beans ready to be harvested, and is determined to get them picked and to Atlanta, even though Madden is clearly willing to resort to violence. So Nick and Steve have to use a subterfuge just to get on the road, and then even when they get to Atlanta the buyers have already heard from Madden and are extremely reluctant to buy.

But Nick is able to sell, and is then stupid enough to, upon his return to Cat-Tail, start waving around all the money he made selling those beans and getting obnoxiously drunk. Drunk enough, in fact, that I would have been happy to see somebody smack him, as he had become even more of the stereotypical lovable immigrant than he was when we first met him. Steve puts drunk Nick to bed, but Nick escapes and confronts Madden, who kills Nick in self-defense even though Madden realizes nobody will believe him. So Madden dumps Nick's body and pins the murder on Steve and Lola!

Juke Girl is an interesting movie, at least until it takes that ridiculous plot turn with not even 20 minutes to go, so it really wraps up way too quickly. Reagan and Sheridan do reasonably well with the material they're given; Whorf is actually the best; and Tobias and Lockhart are both given sub-par material. Tobias is a stereotype, and Lockhart has to overact shamelessly for his climactic scene. And the local law enforcement is expected to act out of character in the climax.

So there are certainly some flaws in Juke Girl, but it's still an interesting movie of its time. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.