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.

Ambassador Bill

Another of my recent DVD purchases was a box set of Will Rogers movies, in fact Volume 2 from Fox. Recently, I decided to fire up my DVD player and watch one of the discs off that box set, namely the film Ambassador Bill.

Now the first thing I noticed is that the print used opens up with the Fox Fanfare, which was added much later, since Fox and 20th Century didn't merge until a good four years after this movie was released by the Fox Film Corporation. But that has no bearing on the rest of the movie. Rogers plays Bill Harper, an Oklahoma cattleman who has just been named the new American ambassador to Sylvania, one of those fictional countries somewhere in Central Europe (or more specifically in this case the Balkans which pop up in a lot of movies from this era. His job is to help the Americans secure a contract to develop Sylvania's infrastructure, which is going to be difficult given the country's political situation.

As Bill is flying in, he counts the shots from the cannonade, thinking he doesn't merit a 21-gun salute. But then a 22nd shot goes off, and his pilot Lothar (Ray Milland) informs him that the country is going through one of its regular revolutions. You'd think an ambassador would know a bit about the country he's being posted to.

One of the first things a new ambassador is supposed to do is to present his credentials to the country he's representing, and that's where we learn more about the country's complicated political situation. Sylvania is a kingdom, but the current King Paul (Tad Alexander) is only about 10 years old. That means he's got a regent, and the regent is the Queen Consort, Vanya (Marguerite Churchill). However, the real power behind the throne is the Prince Polikoff (Gustav von Seyffertitz), who engineered the abdication of the King.

Wouldn't you know it, but that king is... Lothar, who piloted Bill into Sylvania and then shows up unannounced at the American embassy late one night to tell Bill the "true" story. Bill, meanwhile, has taken a liking to the poor boy king, seeing that Paul doesn't have any chance to be just a boy or to learn how to become a man. In what would seem like a major breach of diplomatic etiquette, Bill becomes a sort of foster father to Paul, teaching him baseball and rope-handling and the like. He also becomes a bit close to Vanya, who still holds a torch for Lothar.

Polikoff, for his part, has cards up his sleeve to play, and tries to entrap Bill with a honeypot, the Countess Ilka (Greta Nissen). This ultimately leads to another revolution. Since it's a Will Rogers film, you can guess which side wins.

Will Rogers was a big star in the first half of the 1930s up until his tragic death in a plane crash in the Alaskan bush, and watching movies like Ambassador Bill, it's easy to see why. He comes across as affable with an easy charm, and his homespun humor is always gentle. Ninety years on, his style may not be to everyone's taste and the material may not have aged well, but I think it's still important to see movies like this to see what America had a taste for in the early 1930s and what the phenomenon of Will Rogers was. Rogers may not have been the prototypical Hollywood star, but a star he most certainly was.

Steamboat Round the Bend

Quite some time back, I recorded Steamboat Round the Bend on TCM. I recently noticed that there's a box set of Will Rogers movies that includes Steamboat Round the Bend, so recently I watched it to do a review on here.

Will Rogers plays "Doctor" John Pearly, one of those medicine-show quacks who plies his trade in a decrepit riverboat up and down the Louisiana/Mississippi section of the Mississippi River in the 1890s, having to deal with all sorts of people along the way, such as rival captains like Eli (Irvin Cobb), and revivalist preachers.

Into Doc Pearly's life comes young Fleety Belle (Anne Shirley). She's the girlfriend of Doc's nephew Duke (John McGuire). Duke, meanwhile, is in legal trouble. One of the rural types from Fleety Belle's community was also in love with her, and confronted Duke over it, resulting in an incident in which Duke killed the other man in apparent self-defense. The authorities didn't see it that way, however, largely because no witnesses could be found to corroborate Duke's story, the only one being one of those preachers calling himself "New Moses". So Duke is convicted and sentenced to be executed down in Baton Rouge.

Doc needs a good way to get the money to get better legal representation for Duke. One of those ways involves a discarded wax museum, which he picks up, and uses to turn his riverboat into an attraction. Not that any of the locals agree with it. Fleety Belle, for her part, is willing to break Duke out of jail, but Duke will have none of that, since he doesn't want Fleety Belle to wind up in legal trouble herself.

Eventually, Doc Pearly comes across a blockage in the river, as traffic is being stopped for the start of a race from that location to Baton Rouge, which coincidentally happens to be where Doc is trying to get to to see the governor about a possible retrial for Duke. What Doc doesn't realize is that the execution is being put off until after the race, or at least after Captain Eli's ship crosses the line first. So if Doc can take his old wreck of a riverboat and finish ahead of Eli, he might still have a chance to save Duke. And he might have a chance to find the New Moses along the way, too.

I have to admit to not having seen too many Will Rogers movies, so I'm not quite certain if Steamboat Round the Bend is typical of his films. His acting style is certainly different, and it's definitely going to be an acquired taste for the audiences of the 2020s. His folksy, gentle humor, however, is something that apparently really appealed to at least a certain segment of the American moviegoing population during the first half of the Depression, which is why Rogers was such a hit until his tragic death in a plane crash in Alaska not long after he completed filming on this movie.

The story in Steamboat Round the Bend is a bit of a mess, as it felt to me as though there were multiple disparate sublpots the writers were trying to mesh together, and it doesn't always work. With that in mind, it definitely helps to be a fan of Will Rogers. The supporting actors, however, are mostly given a scene or two each to shine, much to the movie's benefit.

If you haven't seen a Will Rogers movie before, do yourself a favor and give him a try.