Li'l Abner

I grew up on this one, and it's one of the few that my family still agrees on as being hilarious and worthwhile.

It's about a bunch of wonderfully stereotypical mountain people. The hero is Li'l Abner, a strapping big young man who eats "pork chops for' breakfast, pork chops for' dinner, and for' supper, mo' pork chops." To quote the opening song, "He's the biggest catch in Dog Patch." The entire plot revolves around the impending Sadie Hawkins race where eligible gals chase eligible guys to win husbands.

The characters are what make it worth watching - Mammy Yokum, who stands about 4'7" and has a potato shaped nose and rules all with her inexorable will; Pappy Yokum, whose memory is balder than his bald head and who lives his life in happily forgetful delirium, punctuated by moments of terror brought on by his wife; Hairless Joe, who's basically just big and loud and stupid; Lonesome Polecat (brilliantly played by Buster Keaton), who's basically just weird and small and stupid; and several more. Not quite as quotable as some of the cult classics, but my dad and I regularly allude to some of the lines - "Look - it's Granny!" "I'se a-comin, Pansy, I'se awake!" Give this one a chance. It's somewhat slow, but worth it.

I was pleasantly surprised watching this comedy for a number of reasons. First, it was not as low budget and amateurish as I expected. It was actually a quite respectable B movie with make-up, sets, stunts and camera-work that matched the level of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy features of the time.

Second, Buster Keaton's short role prefigured the third banana roles he would play in the American International Beach Movies of the 1960's. His on-screen time is less than five minutes, still, I suspect he had a lot more to do with the production of the movie than his bit part would indicate. The gags have a Keatonesque quality. For example the ending scenes of the women chasing men are reminiscent of the ending scenes in his "Seven Chances." The world of Dogpatch has a self contained, parody of the intellectual world quality, as does many of the comedic worlds created by Keaton (See his "Three Ages" for example.

The humor in the movie foreshadows the hillbilly humor of the 1960's television series, "The Beverly Hillbillies." A recent Lucille Ball biog movie suggested that Keaton had played a major part in the success of the 1950's television series "I Love Lucy." If Keaton did play a role in designing some of the gags in this movie, one might suggest that Keaton was in some sense responsible for a great deal of the successful comedies of the 1950's and 1960's.

On the other hand, the producers might have hired them only because they liked his silent film work and he might not have had any input to the film other than his two or three days on set in his bit part. I wonder if anybody else has any information about the role Keaton played in this still charming movie.

When LI'L ABNER was made, in 1940, Al Capp's comic strip of the same name was one of the U.S.'s favorites, with his hayseed creation finding himself in one jam after the other, without trying at all. A story by Capp is the foundation for this film, which holds a unique spot in cinema history, as it is the only attempt to precisely recreate comic illustration, utilizing makeup, costumes and exact phrasing (without interpretation). The plot and subplots generally revolve about the annual Sadie Hawkins Day celebration in Dogpatch, which presents area females with just about their only opportunity to catch a husband, by literally running down and snaring one of the town's fleeing bachelors. For those who remember the silent film era, this effort provides small roles for many pre-talkie stalwarts, including Buster Keaton, Edgar Kennedy, Chester Conklin, Al St. John, Lucien Littlefield, Hank Mann and Edward Brady. At times very reminiscent of Capp's drawing, the very tall Jeff York, billed as Granville Owen, is effective as Abner. Martha O'Driscoll, Kay Sutton and Billie Seward, as the three women most vigorously seeking marriage with Abner, do their hearty best with the thin scenario. More silly than cute, this picture is not marked by outstanding work from cast and crew, its significance coming only from the mentioned verisimilitude.

Every urban culture has a myth about some primitive people that is essential to their identity. Often of course it is the original people that were displaced, and that's the most natural. The Nordic countries do it in this way. But that slot is filled in strange ways across the world. Brazil fills the spot in several ways, with natives, slaves, and the now relatively backwards Portugal being juggled.

In the US, we do something similar, though we handle our native Americans differently. We handle our guilt by overly romanticizing them, a role they eagerly accept. (Indeed, they have reinvented their history around this notion of nobility.) But we do have what everyone else has in this myth of a simple people. You can see this in movies, naturally, as movies are where we as a society mainly maintain our persistent myths these days.

So we have two types of movies that fit this. Blacks aren't allowed in this category. We handle them differently. Immigrants before the recent Hispanic wave of the 60s are particularly represented. The biggest recent example was "Big Fat Greek Wedding," which follows the rather strict model of embracing a sort of innocent stupidity while laughing at it. Its a sort of being in and being out at the same time.

And we have slight variant on this, something I'll call the hillbilly movie. This usually IS hillbillies, Clampets, or Ma and Pa Kettles. The purest form has them puzzled by shoes or plumbing fixtures. This movie is in that tradition.

Its a strange experience if you know the comic strip. That strip was highly political. It and "Pogo" were often the most intelligent things in US newspapers for decades. Al Capp was in a way the political opposite of Gary Trudeau who today does "Doonesbury," perhaps not as clever in narrative but very influential. The strip inspired the famous Lockheed skunkworks, which made secret spy stuff, the inspiration both in name and attitude.

If you know the history and the strip, you'd come to this expecting a deeply political and introspective thing. Instead, this snaps to the hillbilly model, except the characters have prosthetics and histories that resemble their drawn forms.

You might only want to watch this to see how easily movies embrace some of our cultural legacies and at the same time find it difficult to be insightful in useful ways.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Al Capp's cartoon strip was so satirically acidic that he was constantly being threatened with suit by the public figures he parodied--and at least one, Joan Baez, actually took him to court. But viewers needn't expect much of Capp's celebrated wit in this 1940 cinematic take on the much-celebrated residents of Dogpatch, USA; more silly than clever and more embarrassing than entertaining, L'IL ABNER has been justly neglected for more than a half a century.

Still, it does have a few charms, and most of these are among the cast. Director Albert S. Rogell was a workhorse of the silent era, and the film is crammed to overflowing with a host of silent actors taking one more shot at fame--with the great Buster Keaton the most celebrated name on the roster. Sad to say, they are largely wasted, but we're at least given a chance to see them once more, a decade after their stars faded.

The most successful members of the cast are actually the younger players, with Jeff York (billed as Granville Owen) unexpectedly effective in actually looking the part of L'il Abner himself. Martha O'Driscoll is merely acceptable as Daisy Mae, but Billie Seward strikes all the right notes as the man-hungry Cousin Delightful. And now and then a moment "pops" enough for you to see a little of what made Capp's concepts so wickedly funny.

The plot is standard Capp, but it lacks Capp's bite: Daisy Mae loves Abner, Cousin Delightful wants him for herself, and Abner prefers pork chops. In terms of production values, the film was very obviously done on the cheap, and Rogell's direction is hardly inspired: not only is the camera static, the pace is positively leaden. Fans of the original strip will probably find it a guilty pleasure, but even they will likely admit that this is Al Capp with both fangs pulled.

Gary F. Taylor, aka GFT, Amazon Reviewer