The Medicine Man

Jack Benny, future star one of the most successful radio and television comedy series of all time, starred in this early-talkie for the low-budget small studio Tiffany at a time nobody was really sure what Benny's place in the world of the movies was.

At the time he was best-known as an emcee (and had played that role in the variety-show film "The Hollywood Revue of 1929" the previous year), so in this fictional movie he is given a part that is part emcee and part romantic lead as he plays the "Doctor" running a traveling patent medicine show. He plays the part well, but his emceeing duties are relegated to one somewhat extraneous scene in the middle of the film that is not terribly well-written and ruined anyway by a truly horribly realized laughter sound effect, and otherwise his talents are squandered in such a bland role as he is asked to play.

This film doesn't have too much to recommend it; the plot is a standard-issue about a girl who falls in love with the Benny character instead of the man her father wants her to marry. The acting on the part of the other actors is rather stiff and forced, with the exception of E. Alyn Warren, who plays his one-dimension father character to the hilt.

This father is a broad caricature of an evil, overbearing overlord, and he beats his daughter and son violently in a couple of very uncomfortable-to-watch scenes. When a movie introduces horrible domestic abuse and suggestions of rape (from the father's proposed husband) as a plot element, doesn't ever really deal with them, then expects the film to remain light, frothy, and fun it just isn't going to work.

A couple of attempts at comic relief with a strange woman following Beny's character from town to town and a member of the show who gives rise to the shocking discovery that sometimes people cheat at three-card monte come off as stilted and long rather than funny.

Presumably since this was both an early talkie and made at a smaller studio that might have been slower to adapt to the technology, the sound is often recorded very oddly and poorly, with people randomly getting louder or quieter and always sounding indoors, and crowd noises turning on and off sharply.

This is interesting as a historical curio documenting the traveling medicine show that was a fixture of small-town show business at the time and for its chance to see a young Jack Benny, but apart from these it's a pretty stiff film that doesn't really seem to know what it wants to be, and isn't a very good example of anything.

The Medicine Man is a poor example of an early talkie. Slow and dumb, with a rustic cast of German-American characters DW Griffith would gag on. Jack Benny's presence makes it historically interesting, but that's about it. Benny gets off the only good line, "The New York critics have proclaimed this show the greatest amalgamation of merry making mirth provokers since Shakespeare was barred from Avon." And he mispronounces "Avon." The plot is more-or-less the same as The Music Man but without any of the music, acting or dialog. For Benny completists only.

When watching The Medicine Man with Jack Benny one has to keep in mind that at this stage of his career Benny had not yet hit on the lovable tightwad character in which his comedy was built around. He was just another old vaudeville performer trying to make it in Hollywood at a point when studios were signing them up because of some kind of stage training. Benny's career in film was never all that significant, his primary venue was radio and later television where the tightwad image was so ingrained in your mind, it was what you expected and knew how he would react in a given situation.

That is not The Medicine Man. In this film Benny is a barker for a medicine show, not a respectable profession. But for Betty Bronson and young Billy Butts, brother and sister, he represents a way to get out from a really horrible life with a cruel and repressive father.

Jack does not really cut it as a romantic figure. But that might have not been his fault. The inevitable complaint from performers is about typecasting in a particular role. What was a complaint for most was something Benny absolutely relied on later for his comedy to work. It worked so well that even looking back at films before his hit radio show, he just can't be seen in another part.

But he'd have preferred it that way.

This is an odd curio of the early sound era in movie history, an attempt to mix melodrama and comedy that might have worked better on the stage than it does as a movie. Most of the interest in watching it now comes from Betty Bronson's sympathetic performance as the heroine, and from seeing Jack Benny in what seems to have been his first starring role in a feature-length movie.

The story has Bronson and a younger brother as the children of a tyrannical and abusive shopkeeper. They meet up with a traveling medicine show led by Benny's character, who then becomes involved in their family problems, while at the same time trying to keep an eye on some of his shifty associates who have a knack for getting in trouble with the law. The setup has enough of interest to make for a good story, but it doesn't ever feel as if things come together.

Some of the intended humor doesn't quite come off, and some of the behavior of the shopkeeper father is unsettling. He's a genuinely nasty character that you don't expect to see in movies of the era, and while the character serves to call attention to child abuse issues, it doesn't mesh with the parts of the movie that are supposed to be much lighter. It's hard for the comedy to work when the young heroine and her brother face such an unpleasant situation, and yet the lighter material also takes attention away from the seriousness of the issues involved. To some degree, this may just be a sign of its era, for in the early sound era it is not uncommon to see movies with awkward pacing and material that does not always fit together.

Bronson is the bright spot of the movie, although this kind of scenario does not really allow her to use her talents to the best advantage. She makes her character engaging and believable, and this gives you a reason to maintain interest in the rest of the movie. It's interesting to watch Benny, especially in comparison with his better-known performances later in his career. Here, you can see signs of the talents that eventually would make him such a wonderful entertainer, and at the same time you can see that this kind of movie is not where his strength lies.

THE MEDICINE MAN (Tiffany Studios, 1930), directed by Scott Pembroke, is not a story about a doctor and his rare medicine discovery for some rare disease. It's actually a minor little melodrama dealing about a carnival man whose profession is never giving suckers an even break by selling tonic bottles for one dollar. While such a story might have starred such silent film comedians as W.C. Fields, Harry Langdon or Lloyd Hamilton getting a fresh start in the new medium of talking movies, THE MEDICINE MAN, in fact, gives the acting honor over to a relatively newcomer by the name of Jack Benny, the same Jack Benny of vaudeville, radio and later television. Having made his movie debut as master of ceremonies in the all-star musical, THE HOLLYWOOD REVUE OF 1929 (MGM, 1929), followed by a backstage musical, CHASING RAINBOWS (MGM, 1930), starring Bessie Love, Benny gets his first leading role not for a major studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, but one for a poverty-row one (Tiffany Studios). Though most famous for comedy, Benny, usually a straight man surrounded by comical gags, basically plays it straight in an offbeat production such as this.

The story unfolds in a small town grocery store where Mamie Goltz (Betty Bronson) and her younger brother, Buddy (Billy Butts) work for their widower father (E. Alyn Warren) helping with the stock. Also working for Goltz is a young man named Gus (Vadim Vraneff). Goltz, however, happens to be an abusive foreign-born father who whips his children whenever things don't go his way. Entering the scene is Doctor John H. Harvey (Jack Benny), a medicine man in a sideshow parading down the street in his automobile to a crowd of cheering country folks, including Mamie, with whom John, the titled medicine man, takes an interest. He later comes into the store to offer her tickets to attend his side show that night. Though Goltz does give Mamie and Buddy permission to go, after finding a record broken earlier by Buddy, as punishment, he sends them both upstairs to bed. Though they manage to sneak away the backdoor entrance to attend the show, Miss Wilson (Dorothea Wolbert) and Hattie (Caroline Rankin), a couple of snoops, notices them in attendance and do their duty by notifying their father. Miss Wilson tells on Mamie again later on when she catches her and Harvey along together kissing. After Mamie is brutally whipped by Goltz, and not wanting his daughter to have anything more to do with the medicine man, he allows to have Peter (Adolph Milner), a fellow middle-age widower with children, a man whom Mamie detests, to marry her against her will.

While THE MEDICINE MAN includes certain scenes that comes as a reminder of an old-fashioned silent melodrama, namely D.W. Griffith's BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) in regards of child abuse, its theme in present might have already seemed out of date even by 1930. E. Alyn Warren as an accented peaking father, is definitely no threat to Donald Crisp's brutal performance in BROKEN BLOSSOMS, though he is one father who brings fear to his children to not send him a Father's Day card, plus bitter anger to the hired hand whenever his anger gets the better of him. Granted, for a Jack Benny movie, THE MEDICINE MAN is not a comedy, which would be a disappointment to his fans. At the same time, his most avid followers would see how he performs himself in a dramatic story out of curiosity mainly because he's in it. Though some of the Jack Benny style can be found here, especially during his side show performances, most of the humor goes to Tom Dugan and George E. Stone as Benny's associates. Aside from humorously keeping a gold-digger, Hilda (Eva Novak) away from Harvey, they do a comedy take by cheating customers of their change after selling medicine bottles. His similar style of cheating suckers of their money was done better and most famously by Bud Abbott of Abbott and Costello comedy team a decade later. Dugan also gets to cheat his sucker in card games where he always comes out a ahead, maybe. Dugan and Stone briefly do a comical song that stirs few chuckles from its audience before Benny steps in with his sales pitch of his tonic bottles.

Sadly, circulating 66 minute prints contain poor visuals and occasional jump cuts indicating some minor missing material, especially during the carnival sequence. Virtually forgotten and unknown even to film scholars, regardless of some availability, including video cassette and some broadcasts on public television during the late night hours in the 1990s, THE MEDICINE MAN gets by on its own merits, especially when Jack Benny films are concerned. (** elixers)