Dreaming Out Loud

In Pine Ridge, Arkansas, Lum and Abner run the Jot 'Em Down General Store, and take a kindly attitude towards their neighbors.

It's based on the long-running (1931-1954) radio show created and written by and starring Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, based on their home town of Waters. In an instance of life imitating art, Waters changed its name to Pine Ridge. The show was mostly performed by Lauck and Goff, who took on various personnae. It featured a string band, and the humor was gentle and hillbilliyish.

For the movie, the two had to add a lot of players to fill out the cast list. Frances Langford, Frank Craven, Bobs Watson, Clara Blandick, Irving Bacon, and Phil Harris appear, as well as several lesser known players. It is a pleasant story, and carried off with a great deal of charm under the direction of Harold Young.

A mandatory delight for all fans of Old Time Radio for a variety of reasons. First off, for its eponymous stars, but along with them, several bonuses. First, there's Jack Benny's bandleader Phil Harris playing–slightly against character–a slick-talking "big city" salesman in a role that's brief enough to be considered a cameo. The beautiful 27-year-old Frances Langford serves as the story's love interest and croons the only tune, the movie's title. Hard to believe she was only six years away from playing the harridan Blanche opposite Don Ameche in the hilarious The Bickersons series. And finally, outside the OTR world, we have Dorothy Gale's immortal Auntie Em, Clara Blandick. The movie itself is a sterling testimony, as both an homage and an obeisance, by Hollywood to rural America in the 1940s. Lum and Abner stand as legitimate grandpappies to Andy Griffith, in its both Sheriff Andy Taylor moral rectitude and Deputy Barney Fife's whiny braggadocio. Our heroes, Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody, portrayed by real-life creators Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, are aged to Gandalfian proportions, though they were all of 38 and 34, respectively, and protested occasionally in the radio program that they "weren't all that old." A few L&A names familiar to OTR fans are spoken here, but the characters presented are an acceptable alternative vision of the long-running radio series. Like the title implies, this Pine Ridge is a dreamland where kindness defeats badness effortlessly, death is never in vain, and 'progress' equals salvation. Stylistically, the movie creaks a bit. The opening titles are clumsy and antiquated. Brief establishing shots present Pine Ridge, Arkansas as a suspiciously lumpy venue, less like eastern U.S. flatlands than a California studio back lot. The film is occasionally blurry and the soundtrack muffled–it could benefit with a good restoration. Still, any true OTR fan will be 'inneresed,' if not delighted, in seeing what the old boys are up to.

For over one quarter of a century, Lum and Abner gave their radio listening public a finely layered and detailed view of small-town life, as represented within the Ozark community of Pine Ridge, Arkansas. During that period, Chester Lauck, who portrayed Lum Edwards, and Norris Goff, as Abner Peabody, completed seven films as the rustic duo, with DREAMING OUT LOUD perhaps the best, as it presented them as able to conduct themselves as their fans desired them to be, whimsical and helpful to those in need, but additionally engaged with an incident-packed scenario. Lum and Abner always demonstrated respect for life and children and people of all ages, and in this work, well directed by Harold Young, they are faced with tragedies and crises aplenty, but somehow manage to develop a solutional formula for each. Veteran performer Frank Craven gives a refreshing performance as Doctor Walter Barnes, resident physician of Pine Ridge, and nifty turns are displayed by Phil Harris as a travelling salesman and Irving Bacon as a town constable. The title melody is sung by petite and nubile Frances Langford, whose role is as Alice, postmistress ensconced in Lum and Abner's Jot 'Em Down Store, and whose romance with the son of Doctor Barnes is interwoven with most of the film's subplots.

The sound and picture quality in this one are just TERRIBLE, but I guess we're just lucky to have ANY prints of this still around. Moving from radio to the big movie screen, Chester Lauck and Norris Goff were two old southern codgers, getting through the day with just their senses of humor. In this one, they run a general store, and deal with the goings-on of the local townies. When an emergency comes up, the guys rally the townspeople together to try to solve the problem. It's all a simple plot, but entertaining enough. The sound quality gets a little better about halfway through the film, but not by much. Also, both TCM.com and IMDb list this at 81 minutes, but the DVD version I found (Alpha Video) is only 65 minutes...WHERE did the other 16 minutes go ?? What a rip. Directed by Harold Young. He appears to have started in the biz as an editor on the silents, then started directing in the 1930s and 1940s. Pretty good. Nice family-safe entertainment to kill an hour.

In what we now call the red states in the USA Lum and Abner were very popular on the radio. These rustic storekeepers who hailed from the mythical town of Pine Ridge, Arkansas entertained people on radio for a quarter of a century. Dreaming Out Loud is one of a few films where folks got to see Norris Goff and Chester Lauck do their Lum and Abner characters and it certainly helped with the radio ratings when this film helped stir their imaginations about what Pine Ridge looked like.

Some familiar characters are in this independent film released by RKO like Phil Harris as a traveling salesman, Frances Langford as the postmistress who likes country doctor Frank Craven's son Robert Wilcox. But her aunt Clara Blandick nurses an old grudge against Craven for not marrying her. Blandick holds a grudge like Ms. Evasham.

Anyway a hit and run death and a heart attack suffered by Craven are part of the main story line. Those incidents make it a bit more serious than what you expect from Lum and Abner.

But these two still got fans. So this cheaply made independent will certainly please them and maybe gain a few new fans.