Juana la loca

It is still fascinating at just how much America's movie going public apparently wanted to believe that we were facing idiots during World War II. There can be no other explanation for Joan Of Ozark, especially coming out in early 1942 when major studios let alone B picture studios like Republic were rushing out with propaganda films of very dubious quality.

What's sad to me was that Joe E. Brown and Judy Canova were a good team with their popularity in the red states. It's too bad they didn't get better material.

Joan Of Ozark finds Judy in her hillbilly persona accidentally shooting down a carrier pigeon that is carrying secret coded messages from a Nazi spy headquarters in The Ozarks. Immediately she's proclaimed a national heroine, but in Berlin she's the deepest darkest kind of villain impeding the Nazi war machine. Orders straight from Himmler come to get Judy Canova and make her an example lest more John Q. Citizens interfere.

How to do it though? The head of the spy ring Jerome Cowan comes up with a brilliant idea. Cowan also doubles as a nightclub owner and he gets gullible agents Joe E. Brown and Eddie Foy, Jr., to stop trying to sell their client Anne Jeffreys and go to the Ozarks and fetch Judy as a club attraction, the better for the Nazis to get access.

Of course Joe and Judy in their guileless ways manage to foil the villains of course. You expected something else?

As an example of wartime propaganda of the worst kind you'd have to go some to find something worse than Joan Of Ozark. All the cast members do deserve some kind of commendation for managing to keep a straight face through all this drivel.