Fox, the Archives and Will Rogers.

The Will Rogers Story.

The big gap in my understanding of Hollywood had always been the films the William

Fox Company made before the merger with Daryl Zanuck's Twentieth Century.  Zanuck put his own earlier films, like Call of the Wild, into re-issue in preference to the old Fox product, though some of it did get used to make weight in TV packages in the black and white years.

This meant that I never got to see the body of the work of stars like Victor McLaglan, Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrel, Warner Baxter and  Will Rogers. A few of these bubbled up in John Ford retrospectives but they were the exception.

This left the Fox films near virgin territory for DVD re-issues and suddenly they surfaced in great box sets. Murnau and Borzage were treated handsomely. Possibly even more impressive is sudden access to the work of Will Rogers who I had thought of as a celebrity moonlighting in movies, knowing mainly his silent comedy shorts or The Headless Horseman (Edward D. Ventururini 1922) where he was a bad match for Ichabod Crane. As a few of the films from his tragically brief sound career surfaced, Dr. Bull, Ambassador Bill, even A Connecticut Yankee, this impression was confirmed. 

Now I've only begun on the newly available titles and already I've had to revise my estimate and start to understand Rogers as the biggest movie star earner of the early thirties.

Pick of the batch has been Henry King's 1933 State Fair with Rogers pretty much the ultimate in folksiness. This one’s legend has been inflated by it’s eighty year inaccessibility. That makes insignificant the periods when Vertigo or Passenger went off the market. The only comparable phenomenon would be the the return of the 1916 Ivan Mozjoukine-Protazanov Queen of Spades after revolution, civil war, Joseph Stalin, and the Iron Curtain with a reputation kept alive by the dwindling number of aging admirers who saw it first run.

State Fair kicks off on the Frake (Rogers) farm which is a whole twenty five miles away from the state capital where they exhibit at the annual agricultural show. Locals go round saying “I’ll bet my hide” and “You mark my word” while neighbor Frank Craven (the original narrator in "Our Town") is an authority on Emerson.

Dad Will is found talking to Blue Boy his prize hog. Daughter Janet Gaynor locates son Norman Foster practicing the hoopla complete with stall holder pitch, using mother Louise Dresser’s embroidery hoops, preparing to get his own back on the carney who cheated him out of the eight dollars he had to spend to win a pearl handled revolver which wouldn’t shoot, while Dresser (Catharine the Great in the Valentino The Eagle) is making her mincemeat pie entry for the baking contest.

Sate Fair : Rogers and Dresser with hair brush.

There’s their truck journey which has a hint of Grapes of Wrath and second unit footage of the real tent city that accommodates the farmers come for the fair. Foster gets stuck into humiliating cheating stall owner Victor Jory, of whom we could see more, and Sally Eilers, the airialist on  Edgar Vess’ Loop-the-Loop light bulb attraction comes to the boy’s aid, claiming her dad is the local constable when sharpy Jory is exposed. (“Watch ain't got no works in it") Victor observes “It’s a good thing your father’s a policeman and not a burglar”. 

Rogers is quite generous in sharing the screen and not imposing his star status but poor Foster spends his time with his back to the camera in the scenes he plays with Gaynor who dominates all her footage. Her character has a problem. “A girl can’t go gallivanting about the carnival by herself.” Then Lew Ayres shows up as her potential squeeze with some nicely written material about him not wanting to spoil her reputation by being seen with a city dude like him.

Some of the comedy is a bit on the disturbing side. Ma’s mincemeat, where she says “I’m

not gonna put liquor in my cooking”, ends up getting a double dose of Apple brandy which

gives the approving judge the DTs and Blue boy, who seemed to be part of the family to the point where Will urges Janet to stretch out along side him (“Anybody gets to sleep next to a hog like that. He’s been washed and curried” - using mom’s Xmas present hair brush) faces

being turned into hams at the end.

This is early in the era of back projection and the plates shot by Joe Valentine & Hammeras

the year before in Des Moines get a lot of action including the elaborate tracking shot of the

midway with the actor on a tread mill and foreground objects being pushed past him. This

is a novelty that would wear off.

The superior cast are all at their peak and the film may be considered it's director's best and most characteristic work. It still has the ability to charm an audience with it's nice balance of knowing and innocence. It is one of the most effective of the romanticized accounts of rural life which dominated the Fox schedule.

It's however James (Covered Wagon) Cruze's all but forgotten 1934 David Harum which is probably Rogers’ best movie. One celebrity, who caught the original showing, rated it as the greatest film of all time. It’s one where Will does the “I only know what I read in the papers” signature line.

 Discussions at their Gentleman's club in 1893 New York, with General Noah Beery in one of his rare sympathetic parts, are geared to an audience going through the great depression. “Panic is a lot like war. It’s easy to get into but you’ve got to fight to get out.” Rogers' folksey maxims are more like the ones the studio gave Charlie Chan than the Mark Twain sound they are striving for.

There’s a flashback to Will getting bested in a horse trade with Deacon Charles Middleton who Will gets back. “You don’t tell the other feller everything you know." Will's unmarried sister, regular co star Louise Dresser again and not doing much for her billing, reproaches him about taking down a man of the cloth.

David Harum ; Rogers and Venable

Super appealing Evelyn Venable (she held Columbia's trade mark torch) shows up and Beery gets Will to find a spot for his young friend Kent Taylor after his loss of family fortune and the sweet heart who rejected him as a suddenly poor suitor. We know that pair are going to be the obligatory young lovers even without the giveaway of their lead billing. They are a particularly winning couple which makes our knowledge of their miserable subsequent careers quite poignant.

Kent arrives at “Homeville” in the snow and is exploited by the only cab driver and the hotel owner who offers him the daily rate when he hears he’s going to be working for town banker David Harum / Rogers and, when asked for a couple of chops for supper after the kitchen has closed, stiffs Kent with a can of sardines and plate of crackers in the room with the leaking roof and a hole in the window.

Next morning the locals are gossiping in Kent's hearing about the city dude who expected supper after dining room hours and giving him more feed back on the mean banker. When Rogers shows up the young man repeats this to him, not knowing who he is, but at that point a pair of pug ugly locals appear tearing up their loan repayment form and being warned by Will that he’s outsmarted them with an affidavit from the relative whose signature they forged. This develops into a punch up which Taylor joins and is only saved from being clobbered with an iron hitching weight (more local color) by Venable having at the holder with a riding crop - suitable meet cute.

In another horse trade with Middleton, Stepin Fetchit is included (!) at his most shambling, soaking his feet in the dish washing water and made the victim in horse jokes. Fetchit's screen character remains the central exhibit in studies of the demeaning work given blacks in Hollywood but one theory suggests that the comic "coon" he personified was a form of resistance to white domination, muttering abuse in the negro jargon only they knew and shamming stupidity as revenge. Rogers, who may have been in on this, at one point tells Stepin he can't understand him.  While Fetchit's sub human character is clearly now offensive, the actor is still rather winning. It made him the first Hollywood black millionaire star.

Fetchit gets the In Old Kentucky (Rogers did the sound remake) sub plot of the black servant girl wanting to win at the Harness races to finance their wedding. He also has a nice but too brief victory dance.

Rogers, Middleton and Fetchit

Comes Xmas and Kent is all set to pack up and go, leaving Evelyn behind “No man should marry until he can support a wife.”  However his mind is changed with a more benign take on Rogers who of course gets to forgive the poor widder lady's mortgage he's bought from Middleton.

The horse stuff is much less skillful than the banker and romance plots. Turns out Will's one trading horse is not a balker as was believed but a trotter which only takes off to music, “Down Went McGinty” and “Tarara Boom De Lay” being favorites. (there is pretty much only source music in the film)  Evelyn enters the horse in the Sweep Stakes with Will driving. He persuades Kent to put his savings on the event ("Banking is a gamble too - for the depositors”) only to find too late that one of the other horses has recorded better times.

The big race has Will up against riders, including Middleton and a glimpsed Luke Cosgrave from Cruze's excellent 1928 The Mating Call, in an event where Will has to sing to the animal. We get nicely filmed traveling shots on the track (they don’t appear to be using process) and Evelyn gets the band to play the songs with the crowd joining in making a rousing climax to what is already an engaging piece.

Fetchit, Venable and Rogers

The film form does run to some quite sophisticated handling in the choreographed diner table scenes. Conventional coverage cuts together impeccably, show casing what are the lead trio’s best performances.  Michel Curtiz’ Cameraman, John Ford’s editor and Cruze’s regular writer deliver an impeccably finished film that could pass for something made ten years later.

This appears to be the best of Cruze’s sound films. (I have yet to watch his other Will Rogers movie) It's made without any flourishes but with absolute assurance, another piece of evidence in the case that the director's work has been grossly under valued and raises the question of why his status declined so rapidly.

We can now recognise Fox' craft departments' speciality in US historical or bucolic sometimes thought of as the John Ford style but more likely beginning with the Griffith Way Down East and The White Rose or Henry King's 1921 Tol'able David. King competes with Ford as it's most persistent participant - the 1935 Way Down East re-make, Chad Hannah, Jesse James, Wilson even This Earth Is Mine, against Ford's Will Rogers films, Young Mr. Lincoln, Tobacco Road and finally his The Sun Shines Bright.

Rogers and Tom Mix

This Americana was a style which Zanuck blamed for the studio's failure but one he was unable to eradicate from company product and one in which some of the all time greatest directors would work - notably Ford, Frank Borzage and Victor Fleming.

The films have been overshadowed since their creation by a fixation with film noir and a lack of curiosity about their accomplished directors and stars. Will Rogers was too substantial a part of the US scene to be neglected. Who else occupies a space between Mark Twain and Donald Trump?

               

Barrie Pattison