Sunday, July 21, 2024

The Hardy Family Noir

I mentioned a few months back upgrading my home "theater", not that it's much of a theater, by buying a 40" TV for the upstairs room and getting a Blu-ray player for the TV. The player, it turned out, was misconfigured out of the box in that it was set up to show everything in full-screen, so when I put in a DVD of an old movie not in a wide-screen format, it filled up the screen with no pillarboxing. I couldn't figure out how to change the aspect ratio on the TV until I figured it might be an issue with the Blu-ray player. So that's part of the reason I haven't gotten to my rather severe backlog of DVDs that I have. Well, that, and the fact that stuff only stays on the DVR for nine months while the DVDs are closer to permanent. But recently, I finally decided to watch another movie out of my Will Rogers box set: Too Busy to Work.

A brief establishing sequence shows something that's going to come up again later in the movie: a small town where a hold-up takes place one night, and there's shooting when the getaway car tries to get away. An older guy named nicknamed Jubilo (Will Rogers) witnesses all this. The next morning, we discover the guy is actually a hobo, and one who is very averse to work. He gets involved with another tramp trying to catch a rabbit, before coming upon a swimming hole where a third man has left his suit jacket hanging on a tree. So Jubilo exchages jackets, before walking to a house where we see on a mailbox, "Judge Hardy".

Now, this isn't the Judge Hardy from MGM's popular series of the late 1930s and early 1940s; that's just a coincidence albeit a rather humorous one. Jubilo gets treed by a dog, before the Hardys' maid (Louise Beavers) shows up. Jubilo charms her with stories about being from Alabama, even calling her "Mammy", and basically cons her into giving him some food. As for the man whose jacket he took, that's Axel, who works as a ranchhand on the Hardys' spread since the Hardys have a bit of a soft spot about helping out Depression-era hobos in exchange for doing work around the place.

But Jubilo is work-averse, and tricks Axel into doing what should be Jubilo's jobs, in a way that makes Jubilo seem like a very unsympathetic character. Then again, that's not the reason why Jubilo decided to stop at the Hardy place. He asks Mammy about the Hardy family history, and learns that the judge (Frederick Burton) lost his first wife ages ago and married another woman who had a young daughter Rose who is now an adult (Marian Nixon). Rose's mother died a few years back, and she's in love with the judge's son from the first mother, Dan (Dick Powell, yes, that Dick Powell before he did those Warner Bros. musicals).

That family is actually why Jubilo is here. Jubilo claims that he served honorably in World War I, although considering how we've seen him con Mammy and Axel, one wonders whether this is a made-up story as well. However, Jubilo also says that when he returned from the war, another man had run off with his wife, and that broke him, which is why he's now a tramp, having spent a long time going around the country looking for the man who did this to him. It doesn't take much to guess that Jubilo has concluded that it's Judge Hardy who married Jubilo's wife, and based on conversations the two men have, Judge Hardy knows it, too.

And then Dan returns home, telling Rose that he's going to have to run off. Dan and Jubilo actually saw each other the previous night, as Dan was tricked into serving as the getaway driver from that hold-up. Dan, seeing Jubilo, figures that Jubilo is there to rat him out to the authorities, not knowing anything about Jubilo's real reason for being here. Rose, similarly, doesn't know anything, and doesn't remember her biological father.

This is all rather strange for a Will Rogers movie, since he's generally more remembered for his folksy, homespun wisdom. In fact, this strangeness is why I had some difficulty warming up to Too Busy to Work. Rogers seems terribly miscast for a man with this sort of dark past, and his dark past turning him into a petty confidence man makes him unsympathetic for much of the movie. Also odd is that this is based on a story by Ben Ames Williams, a name you might recognize from one of his most famous works, Leave Her to Heaven.

I'm glad that a box set included Too Busy to Work, but it's definitely a bit strange and not to everybody's taste.

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