The Will Rogers Story

Another movie that I have to admit I didn't realize it existed until the last time TCM ran it is The Will Rogers Story. So, when it ran on TCM, I decided to record it so that I could do a post on it here after I watched it.

The opening credits point out that this is a movie based on a story by Will Rogers' widow Betty (although she had died some years before the movie was actually made), starring Will Rogers Jr. as his father, so expect a bit of hagiography going into the film. And indeed, before we get into the actual action of the film, there's an introduction about how much stuff is named after Rogers even though he's not the sort of person you would normally expect things to be named after. So why is that the case...?

Flash back to a few years before Oklahoma became a state, so the very beginning of the 20th century. Will Rogers was the son of wealthy part-Cherokee Clem Rogers (Carl Benton Reed), but a man who didn't seem to have any good idea of what he should make of his life, to the point that he's been drifting around Texas as a sort of cowboy before he returns home to Oogalah, OK. At the train station, he meets Betty (Jane Wyman), a relative of the station master who is working at the station having recently come from Arkansas. As you can guess, they eventually get married, but in a traditional Hollywood trope, they don't hit it off at first.

Eventually they do hit it off, but by that time Will has to leave Oklahoma to make a success of himself, sending a series of postcards from all over the world as he does ranch hand work in various parts of the world before getting a job with a wild west show where he can do his horseback and lasso tricks. He returns to Oklahoma to marry Betty, except that their honeymoon, such as it is, involves him going on tour with a show for several years.

Eventually, Will winds up in the Ziegfeld Follies, and part of what he does is to provide comic relief during the intermission when the girls are changing outfits and whatnot. Will goes out on stage and provides homespun wisdom that can be interpreted in any number of ways. This really makes him famous, and gets him a career in movies as well as being introduced to pilot Wiley Post (Noah Beery Jr.), that latter being important because Rogers and Post were flying up to Alaska when they were involved in the plane crash that killed the both of them.

One thing that's interesting about The Story of Will Rogers is what doesn't get included, which is Rogers' career as an actor in talking pictures. I'd bet that was almost entirely down to the fact that those movies were made at Fox and The Story of Will Rogers was made at Warner Bros. Instead, the latter portion of the movie deals with Rogers as a foreign correspondent, followed by charity work during the Depression. There's also his realization that aviation is going to have much bigger military use, something that the higher-ups don't want to deal with after World War I.

As for the movie itself, it's entertaining enough, if most likely not overly accurate. (Clem is shown at the 1932 Democratic National Convention even though he'd been dead for 20 years by this point.) Will Jr. does a good job portraying his father, although you get the impression that's about the only role he could play considering that he didn't have much of a movie career. Jane Wyman isn't really asked to do much here but does it adequately. The movie also looks good enough with its Technicolor photography.