A Musical June: I'm From Arkansas (1944)

This month, we turn to a trio of musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood, notable and seldom seen.

SAMANTHA GLASSER: A group of showgirls go to the small town of Pitchfork, Arkansas with their manager in hopes of turning the fertile pig Esmerelda into a stage attraction, when Doris (Iris Adrian) bumps into musician Bob (Bruce Bennett) and mistakes him for a local yokel. He takes offense and recruits his band to badly impersonate a group of amateur hicks, complete with phony beards.

RODNEY BOWCOCK: The whole plot hinges on media hysteria involving a sow that gives birth to eighteen piglets due to a special formulation of mud in the town. This creates a sort of bidding war with different parties wanting to purchase the land where the mud is found. Everything that you and I have described is secondary framework to string together a collection of nearly a dozen country music songs and some ham-fisted comedy routines.

SG: There are a lot of reasons to avoid this movie if you consider yourself to be a highbrow. Polarizing El Brendel is back this week doing a ventriloquist act, a few songs prominently feature yodeling by Carolina Cotton, one scene centers around pig calling, and country stereotypes play a heavy role throughout. In one scene, when a speaker starts double-talking, an audience member says, “See Ma, that’s a college education can do for you.”

RB: The film was sometimes marketed as a showcase for your favorite radio stars, but that’s a stretch really. Cliff Nazarro reprises his famous doubletalk schtick, as you note, around the time that he had spent several years appearing semi-regularly on The Jack Benny Program and essentially playing the same character on The Abbott and Costello Show. Interestingly, (maybe), at least as far as existing broadcasts are concerned, he didn't appear on radio after 1945. His film career was nearly over by this point as well.

SG: Double-talk is a highly respected gimmick among comics, but like specializing in impressions, hardly anyone does much of it anymore.

RB: Iris Adrian can certainly steal a scene or a show, and it’s great to see her with more to do in this film, but this was before she was turning up on a bunch of radio. She had, however, already done a couple of bushels of movies. Arthur Q. Bryan turns up in a lower billed role that really could’ve been played by anyone. Kind of a bummer. He doesn’t even do the Elmer Fudd voice.

SG: Something that stood out to me, because it irritated me, were the manners on display. In one scene at a party, Doris approaches the punchbowl, only to have a man “help” her by taking the ladle out of her hand, and filling her glass, a feat she was perfectly capable of accomplishing herself. These kinds of supposed manners have annoyed me all my life because they’re based on the belief that women are somehow incapable of certain tasks because they’re women.

Harrison’s Reports said, “Most of the footage is consumed by the musical interludes, which is just as well, for they make up the most entertaining parts of the picture. El Brendel and Slim Summerville, as hillbilly characters, provide most of the comedy, but not much of it is effective.”

RB: Summerville was pretty good in this, but El Brendel isn’t going to gain any converts by watching this film. He pulls out his old ventriloquist act, which even at this point reeks of mothballs. Edgar Bergen he isn’t.

SG: I found the music to be the best part of the movie, and enjoyed The Pied Pipers performing “Hit of the Season” the most, which might be the least hillbilly song.

RB: Well, there are certainly plenty of songs. If you don’t like one, wait a couple of minutes and maybe you’ll like the next one.

“I’ve heard better dialogue out of Mortimer Snerd.”

SG: The small towns ate the movie up. C.M. Hulbert at the Gem Theatre in Cornell, Wisconsin called this [an], “Excellent picture for my Friday and Saturday crowd. We need lots more of these.”

Vincent Rost at the Dixie Theatre in New Madrid, Missouri called it, “Strictly corn. But, oh, how they love it in this small town.”

Showmen’s Trade Review said, “The title is clearly indicative of the audience at which the film is aimed... When it gets serious, the picture drags and becomes as slow-footed as the Arkansas sleep-walkers represented by Slim Summerville and his film son, Danny Jackson.” Indeed, I found Jackson’s character to be the most groan-inducing, a slow-moving, dim-witted character in the same vein of Stepin Fetchit.

RB: After watching the movie, I was contemplating it while running errands and has sort of laughed at myself thinking about how much more the small-town theaters likely enjoyed this than the likes of Casablanca and Citizen Kane. Looks like I may have been correct…

SG: It makes you wonder if there was a group of small-town movie lovers petitioning the Academy Awards to include more popular favorites in the nominations then too. Did people care that much about the Oscars? Maybe its usage as a barometer of what was worth reviving only mattered when TV came in, or even later when home video was a factor.

The Film Detective print leaves much to be desired. The picture is quite muddy and the audio isn’t always especially clear.

RB: The movie is in the public domain (along with most, but not all PRC films), so there are plenty of options to watch if this is something that intrigues you. My copy was plucked off of a dealer’s table at the Picture Show a couple of years ago and this was the perfect opportunity to pull it out. It’s taken from a splicy and worn 16mm print but it looked okay overall. Probably not too far off from what was seen at a lot of the more rural theaters.

SG: Three years after its initial release, I’m From Arkansas was pleasing audiences at the Paramount Theatre in Dewey, Oklahoma where the manager said, “This is an old picture, but it packed them in for one night. These small towns like these corny pictures.”

“Picked up this old one and played it on a double feature night to turn-away business,” said R. D. Fisher of the Star Theatre in Willow Springs, Missouri. “Would have singled it, if I realized the draw it had. Corny, but it seemed to please.”

RB: I found evidence of at least one 1953 screening at a theater in Marion, Ohio. By 1955, it was on TV and by 1956, critics were griping that this was the kind of stinker that nobody wants clogging up the schedule of stations. It is interesting to contemplate how tastes changed so quickly. Of course, within a few years after that, films like this were impossible to see anywhere.

SG: I think of movies like this as filler, innocuous diversions without memorable music. They’re great palate cleansers to work in between heralded classic films and represent a piece of movie history not often revived. Two stars.

RB: All things considered, this is pretty good for a PRC movie. Iris Adrian is fun, and the songs aren’t all terrible. The parts are definitely greater than the whole, but overall, I didn’t mind this. Two and a half stars.