Le Bagarreur du Kentucky

This movie is pure Republic Pictures B-movie all the way, with relatively low production values, Vera Ralston (girlfriend of the CEO) and lots of action. And this is not necessarily a bad thing (apart from the lousy acting by Ralston), as the movie is highly entertaining. So, if you just turn off your brain and enjoy, this is a terrific film. I particularly love seeing Oliver Hardy playing a rare supporting actor role very late in his career. Is he believable? Not in the least. But, he's funny and quite the sidekick to John Wayne. The plot, such as it is, involves Wayne falling for Cajun Ralston (a Swedish actress playing a Creole woman?!) and getting into a wide variety of scraps along the way. Not much more to it than that but it is so much fun, who cares?! I can forgive all this because the film is somehow charming and memorable.

Not on the same level as The Searchers or Red River or even Hondo, But The Fighting Kentuckian IS an enjoyable film to watch.

I don't know how accurate the history really is, but I do know that the remnants of Napoleon's band of loyal followers DID establish a community in the Southern part of the US at about the same time that Andrew Jackson was fighting The Battle of New Orleans with the help of, (although not mentioned in this film), Jean Laffite who may have been a pirate, but preferred to be called a free-booter.

Vera Hruba Ralston is the lovely daughter of one of Napoleon's most important Generals. She is quite charming here. Her Czech accent could pass for French.

John Wayne looks marvelous in leather and delivers his lines like a true straight-man when partnered with Oliver Hardy. That is a side-kick combo like no other and worth the price of admission.

The film contains many site gags, but my favorite is the one where Wayne and Hardy pretend to be surveyors and Hardy ends up in a pond.

My favorite one liner in The Fighting Kentuckian is the one where John Breen (John Wayne), after being shot while surveying, comes to a cabin of French settlers, and is discovered by the men who shoot him. They offer him a drink, "Have a shot?" they ask. Breen replies as he mounts his horse, "No thanks, just had one..." and holds up his wounded arm.

There is no point in summarizing the plot line, it is only there to allow John Wayne to kiss Vera Ralston, in the moonlight illuminating the patio of her mansion, watched by her father, the general! That kiss is one of those patented "take her to the moon" kisses that Wayne gave select lucky ladies. (Those lucky ladies reeled for hours after.)

Oliver Hardy is the third part of this delightful three-some. There is action when the French are attacked by the evil river-men who want their land, and are in turn repelled by the Fighting Kentuckians,(the whole kit and kaboodle),lead by a trumpet-blowing Hardy.

When the film first came out it was a smash-hit, and it is easy to see why. There is an easy humor, gallantry and romance here that I miss in modern films. Films now are so message-conscience and so full of unappealing, gratuitous nudity and sex, that it's fun to relax with a film that suggests much more than it shows and does it with style and a wink of the eye.

In 1817, following a land-grant Act of Congress, written to aide Napoleon-supporters in the War of 1812, 340 French families settled on four townships in Alabama. They arrived in Mobile, Alabama on the ship "McDonough" and made their headquarters in a small community named "White Bluff." A year later, with the community developed into a thriving village by their labors, they renamed it "Demopolis," an ancient Greek name meaning "City of the People." These Napoleonic exiles chose not to give it a French name that would recall their native land.

These cultured colonists, from the drawing rooms and military heritage of the old French aristocracy, were likely the least-prepared of any of the immigrant groups who settled the American wilderness, and soon found themselves pioneering the rugged interior of Alabama with illiterate traders, squatters and Indians for their neighbors. They called themselves "The Association of French Emigrants for the Cullivation of the Vine and Olive", but their attempt at olive and grape culture was a complete failure. The Indians taught them how to grow corn and beans, but when they discovered that through a surveying error they inadvertently had built their city outside the chartered boundaries, they drifted away, either returning to France or settling in Mobile or New Orleans. But Napoleon was no great hand when it came to reading maps and recognizing boundaries, either.

Director/writer George Waggner took the surveying mistake and converted it to a land-grab scheme, threw in a motley group of rugged Kentucky militiamen, returning from the Battle of New Orleans, used the most diverse cast in any of the American-frontier films from Republic...and then tossed in ten pounds of plot into a five-pound container. Most of which worked. Aside from the thematic song, a traditional called "Kentucky Marching Song", in which he wrote new lyrics to go with George Anthiel's arrangement. Neither of which, apparently, spent much time on the writing or the arranging.

By 1949 Laurel and Hardy were all but finished (we don't talk about 'Atoll K') but Oliver Hardy, always hard up, needed to work. Hence this unique but worthwhile turn as a genial Southron in George Waggner's middling-good oater.

John Wayne-- Republic's chief asset and now his own producer-- and Vera Hruba Ralston, its boss's wife-- were co-starring in a slightly unusual western. It is set in 1819, heyday of Andrew Jackson's 'manifest destiny' expansionism. French settlers in the Deepest South, Napoleonic exiles, were slogging it out with English-speakers for the ownership of a bit of Creole country.

Wayne and Hardy, attired like Davy Crocketts, are teamed as old Kentuckian pals, veterans of the Battle of New Orleans. Now they're on the loose in Alabama and (since this was still the gallant, humorous Wayne of post-'Stagecoach' vintage) assisting French settlers against larcenous land barons such as John Howard.

Contrary to what lazy film writers maintain, 'Repulsive Pictures', as some jaded employees called it, was never a pure Poverty Row outfit. By the late 1940s it was careful to keep Wayne's market value up by attention to production values, a policy which culminated in 'The Quiet Man'. Here gleaming photography by Lee Garmes and George Antheil's score enhance the Frenchified interest of the mise en scene, and there's a surfeit of plot. (Incidentally Vera Ralston is no worse than many a Maureen O'Sullivan either, despite the cries of uxoriousness against Herbert Yates, Mr Ralston.)

Once again the factor that lifted Wayne above the Audie Murphys and Randolph Scotts is visible abundantly: the charm and grace he cannot help exhibiting, even though he'd have knocked a man down for mentioning them. The lightness and assurance he projects makes it not crazy to compare him with Cary Grant-- who was also at his most beguiling when portraying embarrassment, despite his reputation for smoothness. It has kept many of Wayne's seemingly routine pictures fresh when more pompous major productions have long since become fossilised.

Hardy's main job is to inject slapstick or advise and admonish his chum when Wayne gets too romantic, but he is involved in the mechanics of the plot too. He does so well one feels that if 'Babe' had been less fond of the golf course and in better health, he could have followed many funny men before him into a second life as a character actor.

Used to equality in a double act, Hardy works well with Big John: there's a genuine warmth between them, since unlike too many comics Ollie does not try to dominate their interchanges. Nor does he use the broader schticks of his peerless partnership: he does not mutely appeal to the audience or speak in that slow, absurdly dignified way he uses to challenge Stan's stupidities. He is given business with hats, eats too much, twiddles his incongruously delicate fingers, falls in a river as in 'Way Out West'. But it's all done lightly; Willie Paine's a bit of a clown but not a gross buffoon.

Seeing Babe slugging and being slugged is novelty enough, and there is poignancy in his last shot: marching away at the wedding, as if bidding farewell unknowingly to his Hollywood career. It's an unexpected coda, a box office success to boot, and a heartwarming one after years stuck in unworthy programmers with Stan for Darryl F Zanuck.

Back in the late '70s-early '80s, my local station of WBRZ-2 had aired the "John Wayne Theatre"-which showed many of his movies, primarily from Republic. This was one of the movies from that studio-Wayne's home for a great many years. When stumbling into this one on a Sunday afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to see among the players one Oliver Hardy-a rare film he made without his usual teammate Stan Laurel. I taped this picture in the mid '90s off of American Movie Classics but didn't watch it until now. I'll just now say that Mr. Hardy is quite an amusingly pleasing presence doing some of his familiar mannerisms but also a little different from his "Ollie" character. The highlight may be a fiddler-playing sequence of which Hardy's Willie Payne can play but Wayne's character can't! There's more but I'll just say go ahead and watch The Fighting Kentuckian if the mood fits you! P.S. This version had wraparounds by host Nick Clooney-George's father. In the beginning one, he mentions leading lady Vera Ralston had given Hardy a gift of a deck chair-specially made to fit his girth! In the one after the movie, he erroneously mentions this was Ollie's final film-his actual very last one was Atoll K (Utopia in the U.S.), once more with Stan Laurel. Oh, and since one of the locations of The Bluegrass State mentioned in the movie was Lexington, I have to mention that my family had briefly lived there in '74-'75 and my youngest sister and sibling was born there.