Chicken Wagon Family

A silly plot and annoying characters sink this one fast. The chicken wagon family are a bunch of peddlers who travel from town to town. After the annoying father (Leo Carrillo) steals the family money and loses it in a poker game, the family makes the logical decision of moving to New York City.

Once in the city with the mauls and wagon, they immediately run across the mother's old boyfriend and a friendly cop who set them up in an abandoned fire station. While the daughter (Jane Withers) runs around grinning and fixing up the messes of other people, the father and the old boyfriend (Hobart Cavanaugh) fuss and argue.

Everything comes to a head when they try to auction the fire station and Jane and company buy a consignment of bathtubs. The plot is stupid beyond belief.

Withers tries hard but the material stinks and she's at that awkward age. Carrillo is just plain annoying. Spring Byington is stuck playing the mother, Marjorie Weaver the older sister, and Kane Richmond the cop. Inez Palange as Mrs. Buzzi the coffee shop owner comes off best.

Jane Withers was a 20th Century Fox entry in the Hollywood child movie runs of the 1930s. But she would be in a string of second tier films for the studio which had launched Shirley Temple earlier in the decade. By 1934 Temple was a star and had top casts in her two dozen very good films through the decade. But, Withers had to settle for second tier films and often lesser known or prominent supporting casts. Only a couple of her films were very good, while most were just fair, and a couple were poor films. This happens to have been one of the bad ones.

In the first place, it lacks the main ingredient that comedy is supposed to have - humor. There just isn't any. I can go along with hokey situations and plots for comedies, if they have lots of comedy. But without any, this film's hokey plot of a roaming peddler wagon and its family riding down New York City streets is all corn with no humor. Then, finding an empty, available garage of some sort that they can pull their two-mule team wagon into and make their living quarters, is more corn on top.

The last thing that does this film in is the character that Withers plays - Addie Fippany. Here's a girl who has been taught by her father to sell anything, and any way. So, she learns to scam, be a fraud, and tell lies to sell goods. In others words, it's okay to cheat people - the suckers. While her dad, Jean Paul, played by Leo Carrillo, never quite says it that way, that's what it is. Carrillo plays the type of fun-loving, light-hearted character for which he was known. But Spring Byington, with a terrible attempt at a French accent, is very weak in her role as the mother.

Hal Roach might be considered the Hollywood mogul who discovered the appeal of children's movies or child stars with audiences. He hit it big with "The Little Rascals" of 1930, which spawned a series of movies after that with the same four kids from that movie and others added. That became the "Our Gang" series of family and children films. Those were all comedies, and they usually had some little moral in them.

Other studios soon tried their own child stars and Fox hit it big with Shirley Temple. She could act, dance and sing, and won the hearts of kids of all ages - from two to 92. Unfortunately for her, Withers didn't have all those talents, so after her run of about 20 shorts and uncredited roles, she made a string of plain comedies and family films. But, as noted, hers were mostly lesser plots, casts and budgets.