Steamboat Round the Bend

It's funny to think that when this film was made, it was about a time in the early 1890's, only 35 years earlier than it's production. Now we are looking back almost 75 years at the film itself. I expected a light wacky comedy, but there is definitely a well-rounded plot here revolving around murder in self-defense. Will Rogers gives a very skilled and sympathetic performance, but some of the more hilarious gags in this are gifts from the writers.

The sheriff/preacher's wedding speech goes right up there with Donald Sutherland's in "Little Murders" for sheer comic value.

A great throwaway gag involves the search for the New Moses, when they accidentally run into the New Elijah instead!

Steppin Fetchit, while no great symbol for African Americans, actually plays against his lazy type in this, and his hard work and quick thinking actually save the day on a couple occasions.

A great (and uncommon) saw-playing musical interlude!

To me, the only major weakness was Ms. Shirley as the ingenue. She was quite likable, but did not seem to have lived as hard as her character was supposed to have.

All told, a winner of a film for fans of the 1930's view of the 1890's.

Minor Ford at his most homespun and with Will Rogers in the lead they don't come much more homespun than this piece of Americana. Of course, minor Ford is still pretty good when set beside some of his rivals. This one is almost a companion piece to "Judge Priest" with Rogers' steamboat captain racing his boat against a rival while trying to clear his nephew from a charge of murder. Rogers is excellent and there's a fine supporting cast of Ford regulars but as the young lovers Anne Shirley and John McGuire are terrible. Still, it's richly atmospheric, at times verging on the poetic and if you think the scenes with Stepin Fetchit are more than a little racist try to remember when it was made and the period in which it is set and put it into some kind of historical perspective and be thankful we are living in more enlightened times. The race itself, (and it's a long time coming), is superb.

Will Rogers was typical of popular 1930s stars, in that he wasn't a magnificent actor, but he was a great character. No-one wanted pure realism or chameleonic talent from someone like Rogers, just that he be himself in whatever role he assumed. Looking at a selection of his movies, you can see he took on a variety of parts, never literally playing the same person twice. But whether he was a country farmer, a small town doctor or, as here, a steamboat captain, he was always the same Will Rogers; an earthy, warm and trustworthy father figure, gently overseeing the lives and loves of the younger generation with the eye of experience. Such was the strength of his personality that he was able to break out of the character actor bracket and carry a movie on his own as an unconventional but well-loved lead man.

And a Will Rogers picture was typically populated with a fine crop of colourful supporting players. Anne Shirley and John McGuire ostensibly play the romantic leads, but their performances seem drab amid the likes of Eugene Palette and Stepin Fetchit. A few of these co-stars are deserving of special mention. First is Irvin S. Cobb, actually an author with few acting credits, but his cartoonish face makes him a great pompous villain. Then there is Berton Churchill, who normally played rather stern authority figures, here giving us the brilliant creation of a top hat-wearing, cigar-chomping preacher. Churchill's every line and gesture is a hilarious send-up of the type, and his is surely the funniest performance here. And finally we have Francis Ford, brother of director John. Francis played numerous bit parts for his little brother, almost always as a comical drunkard, but this is probably his most prominent performance. Sadly an alcoholic in real life, he does one of the few truly funny drunk acts to be seen in classic Hollywood, and it's lovely to see him getting the chance to shine he deserves.

It's no wonder really that these cheeky character actors come to the fore in Steamboat Round the Bend, because as a director Ford Junior always gave a lot of weight to such smaller players. While he didn't tend to do much screen writing, would often allow the comic relief scenes to play out with adlibbing, or simply hold the camera on the comedy actors for that little bit longer, such as that great shot of Churchill sauntering off after his first meeting with Rogers. Meanwhile he would shoot the more plot-orientated scenes with the minimum of fuss, making them seem brief and hardly relevant. This is not to say that Ford is unable to bring out the deeper emotions of a story. His masterfully economic expression allowed him to keep the human story going during simple exposition. For example, as the McGuire character explains his unintentional killing of a man, Ford keeps Anne Shirley, mutely hunched forward, clear in the background. Another poignant Ford trademark is the heartfelt singsong, in this case "Home Sweet Home" sung by the inmates of a prison. Like the improvised comedy scenes, Ford was willing to linger over sequences like this for the sake of tone over story.

Steamboat Round the Bend is among the best of all Will Rogers pictures, although it is sadly one of the last. By the time it reached theatres the actor had been killed in a plane crash. Still, even if his life hadn't been cut short, the early-to-mid-thirties would probably have been his career peak. The public's love of homely, irregular movie stars that had flourished in the depression was soon to dwindle. The age of such lively character actors was soon coming to an end as well, as audiences wanted more realism and more focused story lines, as opposed to the variety-show style movies that characterised the early talkie era. Still, touches of this older style would continue to crop up, in the pictures of John Ford up until the 1950s, and even today in, say, the Coen Brothers' more oddball productions, and this is very encouraging to see. And yet, nothing can ever replicate the experience of going back to these old classics, an age when personalities ruled the screen.

Endings are important, and even in light comedies with adventure undertones, those endings end up helping to shape everything that came before it. I was a bit flustered by the first hour or so of John Ford's Steamboat Round the Bend, finding things to like but frustrated at the extraordinary loose nature of the telling, but the ending brought everything together in rip-roaring fashion. Will Rogers' final filmed role before his airplane crash that killed him ends up being a fancifully entertaining trip down the Mississippi.

Rogers plays Doctor John Pearly, a conman selling a tonic he says comes from a recipe by Pocahontas herself, but which is literally just rum, to people on the river as he makes his way up to find his own dilapidated riverboat, ready for him to refurbish and put back on the water. When he first arrives at his new home on the river his nephew Duke (John McGuire) arrives with a swamp woman in tow, Fleety Belle (Anne Shirley). Duke had killed Belle's father in an act of self-defense after they had been seeing each other secretly for some time, but the only witness to the events that could possibly clear his name is New Moses (Berton Churchill), a bearded temperance preacher who travels up and down the river, converting wayward souls. However, before anyone can find New Moses, the law arrests Duke, and John forces Belle's family away by lying and saying that Duke and Belle have married.

This was a strong start, and then the movie just kind of begins to flounder for a while. John takes Belle on his refurbished boat up and down the river nominally looking for Old Moses, but they take on a traveling museum of sorts, filling the hold with mannequins of famous historical figures with a lot of talk about how to Americanize the figures to help attract customers. Some small adventures, misunderstandings, and scrapes dominate the middle section of this film around the museum, and while most of it is very lightly amusing, it feels like the movie itself has gotten lost. There's suddenly no urgency about Duke or his plight. It's kind of odd.

After a brief marriage ceremony to make John's lie of Belle and Duke a reality, Duke gets taken down to Baton Rouge for execution. John ends up chasing after Duke and gets caught up in a riverboat race, forced to join as the only way to go further south on the Mississippi and developing a rivalry with Captain Eli (Irvin S. Cobb), pilot of another steamboat. It's here where the movie reclaims its focus and, more entertainingly, a strong sense of energy as the film becomes a race against the clock on two different fronts, the literal race against the other steamboats and the need to get to Baton Rouge before Duke's execution. They may not have much more of a plan than that, but they have to go. In swift order, though, they encounter New Moses preaching on the side of the river, rope him in (literally), and speed off, burning more and more of the riverboat's ephemera to fuel the engines from the lifeboats to, as the race becomes more desperate, the mannequins themselves. Watching New Moses in all of this is a treat, and when he discovers that John has a supply of the Pocahontas cure all on board, also that it's just rum, he has the idea of throwing them in to heat the engine and propel them faster. It's kind of wild stuff, and it's a very fun comedic crescendo for the whole picture.

The film was apparently cut down by about twenty minutes after Will Rogers' death, mostly in the ending, forcing a final shot of Rogers as John reclining on the deck of his boat. It's a nice moment for the character as well as the actor.

This is the first time that Rogers worked with Ford where it felt like Rogers was actually playing a character instead of just himself, and it's a nice change of pace. He doesn't dominate the film like he does in the other two films (Doctor Bull and Judge Priest) to varying degrees of success, allowing the story to play through without completely overrunning everything else. He's the central character for sure, but he allows space for Annie Shirley, as his primary counterpart, to shine in bright and cheerful fashion.

It really could have used a rewrite in its middle section, a section that dragged the film down a good bit, but that ending is really something else, a madcap race with real stakes and cut quickly for an all around good time. It really won me over by the end.

This movie was shown recently as part of a major comedy retrospective at Film Forum in New York, but it seemed somewhat out of place alongside the likes of the Marx Brothers and Mae West. Steamboat Round the Bend is an interesting and unusual film with occasional comic touches, but it's primarily a serious tale with elements of melodrama. The story is set in the 1890s, and rich period atmosphere is one of the film's strongest assets. Although it's not based on a Mark Twain story director John Ford captures that Old Times on the Mississippi flavor better than a lot of movies based on Twain's books. Ultimately, this is a rich slice of Americana with a distinct Southern bias. That's all well and good if you have an interest in American history as depicted in Hollywood films of this period, but viewers expecting non-stop laughs will be disappointed. Those of us who grew up watching TV in the '60s might find that Steamboat Round the Bend is reminiscent of The Andy Griffith Show: it has the same relaxed tempo, presents a similarly benign view of Southern life (with the stark exception of one sequence, which I'll discuss in a moment), and has as its leading man a very low-key guy.

Here, as in his other talkies, Will Rogers ambles through the proceedings in a seemingly casual fashion. He was unlike any other star of his time -- or since, really -- and viewers who've never seen one of his movies might find him a little odd at first. Like his friend W.C. Fields, Rogers refused to rehearse his scenes and insisted on doing a minimal number of takes, even if he fluffed his lines, which he often did. His acting is so offhand, and so unlike the polished Hollywood performance style of his day, a first-time viewer might mistake him for an amateur who somehow wandered onto the set. Once you adjust to his naturalistic style, however, Rogers' special talent becomes obvious, and it's the other actors who start looking theatrical and phony. Aside from the lead the most memorable performances in this film are given by the growly-voiced Eugene Palette, who gets most of the laughs, and bright-eyed Anne Shirley, who holds her own with Rogers in their scenes together.

Steamboat Round the Bend is probably best remembered as Will Rogers' swan song, the last project he finished before his death in a plane crash, but like much of his work it never had a legitimate video release in the VHS era, most likely because of the presence of the notorious African-American comedian Stepin Fetchit. When several Rogers movies were released on video a few years back the ones featuring Fetchit were skipped, probably because modern day audiences are uncomfortable with the his "comedy relief," and for good reason: watching Stepin Fetchit can be very discomfiting. Anyone who seeks proof of Hollywood racism need look no further than films of the '30s in which he was featured. For those who haven't seen him, it might help to explain that despite the sound of his name and what it implies, Stepin Fetchit was Hollywood's favorite lazy simpleton, a woozy scamp with a slow-as-molasses delivery that's difficult to decipher. He comes off as heavily sedated, or even mentally retarded. Who could laugh at this sort of thing today? In recent years a few film critics and historians (including some African-American ones) have taken a more sympathetic view of Fetchit's career, and have made positive assertions about what he was able to accomplish within the confines of the demeaning roles he was given. Well, whatever. Where this movie is concerned I'll note simply that Fetchit's screen time is mercifully limited, and that the film has only a minimal amount of racial humor. In fact, about halfway through there is a remarkable sequence in which attitudes of the Old South are satirized in a surprising fashion.

To set the scene: Rogers (playing Dr. John), with the help of Anne Shirley (Fleety Belle) is attempting to raise money to pay legal fees to save his nephew from the gallows. They are sailing up and down the Mississippi in his old steamboat with a small crew (including Fetchit as Jonah), carrying what's left of the dummies from a defunct wax museum, charging riverfront locals to come look at the statues. When they reach one particular backwoods village, a mob of men advance carrying torches, pitchforks, axes, and a vat of tar, determined to destroy the boat and punish the wicked theater folk who have brought sinful playacting to their community. Dr. John is slow to recognize the danger, so much so that our credulity is strained, but it's striking to note that Jonah appreciates the danger instantly: he knows a lynch mob when he sees one. Dr. John is eventually able to pacify the mob when he invites the men onto his boat, and convinces them that the wax figures are "educational." This impressive word plus the sight of the dummies in their tatty costumes reduces the locals to a state of slack-jawed submission. The punchline comes when Dr. John gives the signal to raise a curtain, revealing a moth-eaten statue of Robert E. Lee astride his horse. At another command, the figure salutes stiffly, and the now-awed rednecks salute in return. For the finale, Jonah, sitting at the calliope, plays "Dixie" and sings along raggedly in a screechy, off-key voice as the scene fades out. It's a startling sequence, bitingly satirical in a way we don't expect, and perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended. At any rate, this film is well worth a look for viewers who are historically-minded, curious about Will Rogers, or interested in the mass media's presentation of race relations.

P.S. Summer 2006: I'm pleased to add that this film is now available on DVD, in a box-set with three other movies Will Rogers made during the last year of his life.