Will Rogers

This Mark Twain adaptation affords a rare opportunity to enjoy a "collaboration" between two of America's greatest humorists. Will Rogers plays the operator of a tiny radio repair shop, who is called to an old mansion to replace a battery on a dark and stormy night. Here Will meets a scientist (William Farnum) who thinks he can contact King Arthur by radio, a sinister butler (Brandon Hurst), a pair of young lovers who've been forbidden to see one another, and a seductive femme fatale (Myrna Loy). Suffering a blow on the head, Rogers wakes up in 9th-century Camelot. "Could you please tell me where the helleth I am?" Rogers remarks when captured by Sir Sagramor (Brandon Hurst); condemned to burn at the stake as a "sorcerer," Rogers saves himself by pretending to conjure up a solar eclipse. Dubbed Sir Boss, Rogers brings 20th-century mechanization to Camelot, taking time out for long, ad-libbed ramblings about the state of the world in 1931. Sir Boss' new friend King Arthur (William Farnum) is being undermined by Morgan le Fey (Myrna Loy) and Merlin (Brandon Hurst). After finding out that Clarence is his own ancestor, Rogers races against time to keep Clarence alive and get him married to Melisande (Maureen O'Sullivan). The last-minute ride to the rescue finds King Arthur's knights commandeering Model Ts, tanks and autogiros Connecticut Yankee predates Wizard of Oz by having the characters in Camelot and the residents of the modern-day mansion played by the same actors. In the original prints, Rogers' face was tinted red after receiving a kiss from Myrna Loy; this cute sight gag has been restored by computer to the videocassette version. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

In this romantic comedy, a school teacher moves from his home in the country to a small town. He attends a party and becomes a hit when he suggests the partygoers stage a mock wedding with the loveliest girl in town. Much to his surprise, they are married by a bona fide reverend and the marriage is real. Later the town crook tries to make moves upon the beauteous bride and she begs her "husband" not to anull their union. As a result, the spurned bad guy decides to destroy the bank of the young wife's father. Lucky for her, the former school teacher has just sold his big novel. He uses his advance money to save her and then marry her for real. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide

This video double feature consists of early silent short subjects starring those two old Ziegfeld Follies colleagues, W. C. Fields and Will Rogers. Made in 1915, Fields' Pool Sharks is a crude knockabout farce, making very little sense until the climactic pool game. Most of W.C.'s more remarkable shots are accomplished via very obvious stop-motion photography, though his skill with a cue is very apparent. Fields still sports the clip-on mustache that he wore on stage, so he looks more like a besotted, bulbous-nosed Chaplin than his normal screen persona. The Ropin' Fool, lensed in 1922, was produced independently by Will Rogers as a sort of pilot for a proposed short subjects series. There's very little plot to speak of, just scenes of Rogers showing off his astonishing rope tricks and riding prowess. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Very loosely based on Booth Tarkington's novel The Plutocrat, Business and Pleasure stars Will Rogers as Earl Tinker, a newly rich Oklahoma razor-blade manufacturer. On the pretext of taking a vacation with his family, Earl journeys to far-off Syria, there to purchase the secret formula for Damascus steel. During the ocean voyage to the middle east, Earl's daughter Olivia (Peggy Ross) falls in love with struggling playwright Lawrence Ogle (Joel McCrea), while a worldly adventuress named Madame Momora (Jetta Goudal) apparently sets her sights on the bashful Earl, much to the dismay of his wife (Dorothy Peterson). In truth, however, Madame Momora is an "industrial spy" in the employ of Tinker's main competitor, and it is her job to prevent Earl from completing his business mission. But our dumb-like-a-fox hero manages to turn the tables with the use of a clever disguise and a few other dexterous diversions. Filmed before the 1931 Will Rogers vehicle Ambassador Bill, Business and Pleasure was released afterward in early 1932, thereby giving audiences the pleasant surprise of seeing Boris Karloff, newly famous thanks to his performance as The Monster in Frankenstein, popping up unbilled as a desert sheik. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Will Rogers is Dr. Bull, a small-town physician with precious little book learning. This doesn't stop him from ministering to the citizens, often substituting advice and witticisms for pills and sutures. There are those who resist Dr. Bull's everyday doses of common sense and humanity, especially the gossip mongers who read the worst into the doctor's frequent visits to a lonely widow (Vera Lewis). Bull triumphs over his adversaries when he stems a typhoid epidemic, proving that the disease was spread by pollution from the construction camp owned by the town's resident Scrooge (Berton Churchill). Directed by John Ford with his usual compassion towards sensible small-town types, Dr. Bull was adapted from The Last Adam, a novel by James Gould Cozzens. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

It is said that every actor wants to play Shakespeare. Will Rogers would seem a likely exception to that rule, but here he is in this silent, taking a stab (albeit comic) at Romeo. Slim (Rogers), of course, begins as a cowpuncher but his boss switches from cattle to sheep, throwing him out of work. In addition his sweetheart, Lulu (Sylvia Breamer), says he should learn to be a real lover, like Douglas Fairbanks. So Slim decides to go work in motion pictures to discover how film folk make love. After he doubles for villains and heroes alike, Lulu changes her mind -- now she thinks Romeo and Juliet is the yardstick by which all lovers should be measured. So Slim obligingly gets his hands on a copy of the play and tries to read it. Naturally he falls asleep, but he dreams the story with himself and his girl in the title roles. When he awakes, however, he throws all technique out the window, grabs Lulu away from his rival (Raymond Hatton) and drags her off to the preache r. His show of force is what she wanted after all and the film ends happily. This was the final picture of Rogers' contract with the Goldwyn Studios. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

This sequel to the highly successful Will Rogers vehicles They Had to See Paris and So This is London details the further adventures of the nouveau riche Peters family of Claremore, Oklahoma. Oil millionaire Pike Peters (Will Rogers) remains his old "down to earth" self, but his family -- wife Idy (Irene Rich) and son Ross (Matty Kemp) -- insist upon taking on airs. Idy's improvidence reaches hitherto unscaled heights when she insists upon rebuilding the family's French chateau in their hometown of Claremore. Hoping to bring his family to its senses, Pike uses a recent bank failure as an excuse to pretend that he's gone broke. Idy and Ross realize the error of their ways, and things return to normal again -- for the time being, anyway. Some of Down to Earth doesn't make much sense without prior knowledge of They Had to See Paris; in particular, the scenes between Pike Peters and Grand Duke Michael (Theodore Lodi), a Russian aristocrat now reduced to working as a doorman, are far funnier when placed in context with the earlier film. Still, any Will Rogers film is worth watching, if only because Rogers is in it. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Will Rogers plays the lead in this adaptation of a Saturday Evening Post story. While Rogers really needed talkies to bring him cinema superstardom, he could only have portrayed the character of Yal in silents -- after all, who ever heard of Will Rogers with a Swedish accent? Seduced by the promises of America, two sailors --Yal and his pal Skole (Bert Sprotte) -- travel from Sweden to San Francisco. Yal sends a thousand dollars to Hulda, his sweetheart (Mary Warren), so that she can join him, but he never hears from her again. He winds up falling in love with Annie (Doris Pawn) and investing in a delicatessen. But he loses the store and then finds Annie and Skole together. After a passage of several years Hulda finally arrives and she and Yal are married. Only after the wedding does she admit that she was adopted by wealthy Captain Larsen (Charles A. Smith), and that he left her a fortune -- she thought Yal wouldn't marry her if he knew she was a woman of wealth. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Filmed in "Fox Grandeur," an early widescreen process, Happy Days was the immediate follow-up to Fox Studios' Movietone Follies of 1929. Most of the film takes place on the showboat of Mississippi entrepreneur Colonel Billy Batcher (Charles E. Evans). When the Colonel faces foreclosure after several failing seasons, soubrette Margie (Marjorie White) stages a fund-raising revue on the boat, enlisting the aid of all the big stars who got their start with Batcher. By an amazing coincidence, virtually all of the showboat alumni are under contract to Fox Studios! Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell perform "We'll Build a Little World of Our Own," Victor McLaglen and Edmund Lowe kid their roughneck screen images in the novelty number "Vic and Eddie," Sharon Lynn and Ann Pennington offer the "hot" dance routine "Snake Hips," and "Whispering" Jack Smith offers a rendition of the title tune. Also on hand are Will Rogers, El Brendel, Walter Catlett (who also staged the musical numbers), Lew Brice (Fanny's brother), Dixie Lee (Mrs. Bing Crosby) and Georgie Jessel -- not to mention an uncredited 14-year-old chorus girl named Betty Grable. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Oklahoma's own Will Rogers stars in In Old Kentucky. The storyline is in the grand tradition of most films about the Bluegrass State: There's a long-standing family feud, a pair of star-crossed lovers, and a crucial horse race. Rogers cuts through the banality with his seemingly off-the-cuff observations about Kentucky life in particular and the World in general. The best moment of In Old Kentucky has Rogers attempting to escape from jail by putting on blackface makeup and disguising himself as Bill "Bojangles" Robinson--whereupon he's forced to tap-dance to prove his identity. 1935's In Old Kentucky was the third film version of Charles T. Dazey's 1895 stage play. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

This simple comedy drama was adapted from a serial in the Saturday Evening Post, but the film itself doesn't seem to have enough story to have run over several issues of a magazine. Jublio (Will Rogers) is happy with his lazy life as a hobo, but one day when he goes begging for food at a ranch, ranch-owner Jim Hardy (Charles French) insists that he work for his meal. This suggestion would normally have no appeal for Jublio, but when he sees the luscious pie being made by Hardy's pretty daughter Rose (Josie Sedgwick), he not only agrees to do manual labor for the first time in his life, he sticks around for more. After helping Hardy out of a fix or two, the former hobo marries Rose. It seems odd now that attempts were made to turn witty Will Rogers (at the time a Follies phenomenon) into a silent star -- his forte was the spoken word. But then, opera divas such as Geraldine Farrar became silent successes, so perhaps it wasn't so far-fetched. True worldwide fame for Rogers, however, would have to wait for radio and talking pictures. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Will Rogers stars as Judge William "Billy" Priest, the common-sense Kentucky jurist created by humorist Irvin S. Cobb. The Judge's easygoing manner bothers many of the self-righteous good citizens of his small 19th-century hometown, imperiling his chances for re-election. The anecdotal plot boils down to a single storyline involving orphaned Anita Louise, reclusive David Landau (secretly Louise's father), and young attorney Tom Brown.The testimony that saves Landau from a murder charge is delivered by Civil War veteran H.B. Walthall, whose stirring loyalty to the Confederacy inspires everyone in town to organize an impromptu parade! Some of the best scenes are highlighted by Will Rogers' affectionate rapport with stereotyped black-actors Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel, though these scenes are frequently removed from TV showings of Judge Priest due to their undeniably racist overtones. If you haven't guessed by the first frame of the film that John Ford was the director, you'll recognize Ford's personal stamp the moment Will Rogers kneels by his wife's grave and carries on a warm conversation with his long-departed bride. Ford would remake (and improve upon) Judge Priest in 1953 as The Sun Shines Bright, with Charles Winninger as the judge. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Lightnin' is based on the 1918 stage play by Winchell Smith and Frank Bacon, in which Bacon (the father of director Lloyd Bacon) had starred for years on Broadway and "the road." Will Rogers steps into the leading role as "Lightnin'" Bill Jones, the slow-moving husband of Mary Jones (Louise Dresser). Mr. and Mrs. Jones are co-owners of a hotel built right on the borderline between California and Nevada, used as the temporary home of divorcing wives so that they may pretend to be in the "California" half of the hotel while establishing residency in the "Nevada" half. Lightnin' befriends lawyer John Marvin (Joel McCrea), at present residing in the California half to avoid arrest on a trumped-charge. When Lightnin' refuses to sell his share of the hotel to a gang of stock crooks headed by Raymond Thomas (Jason Robards Sr.), Mary is coerced into divorcing her husband so that she can sign over the deed herself. In the semi-serious courtroom finale, Lightnin' not only convinces Mary that she's still in love with him but also manages to clear John Marvin's name. Director Henry King clearly exercised no control over Will Rogers, whose incessant ad-libbing, amusing though it is, slows the film to a crawl. Still, Lightnin' proved to be just as successful as any other Rogers talkie vehicle, proving that audiences came to see the star and not the story. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide