The Great American Pie Company

One of the movies I watched recently off my DVR was in a time slot where TCM had left enough time to be able to program a short before the end of the block. That short was The Great American Pie Company.

The star here was Chic Sale, who to me comes across as MGM's answer to Will Rogers, except that he often played older than he really was. Not in this case, however. Instead, he's Ephraim Deacon, a henpecked husband in the heart of the depression who makes a little extra money when his overbearing wife has him sell the pies that she made. However, Ephraim worries about Phineas Doolittle, another local man who also sells his own wife's pies.

Worse, Ephraim is hungry, and Mrs. Deacon knows exactly how many pies she made and how much money she should get from the selling of those pies, so Ephraim can't eat any of those pies no matter how forlornly he looks at them. Instead, he comes up with an idea, although it's going to involve Phineas....

The two men meet up and sit underneath a tree that has a bench around it. I think I've mentioned that tree before on the blog as MGM had at least one specific tree they put a bench around (they may have had more; I haven't been able to watch enough films together and pay close enough attention to see whether all the scenes are of the same tree) like the one that was in On Borrowed Time. Ephraim comes up with some cockamamie idea about the two men going into business together, while Ephraim uses the spiel as an excuse to pilfer Phineas' pies.

The Great American Pie Company looks like an odd short 90 years on, but back in the day American had a much more rural population than it does now, and there was a strain that liked to look down on the yokels; recall the famous Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix". This short wouldn't have been for the rural market, I don't think. And certainly not coming from MGM; Fox was better at making the sort of film the rural folks like since they had the original Will Rogers.