Steamy Story

Steamboat Round the Bend has a great pedigree: Will Rogers directed by John Ford. It plays like it too - John Ford showers us with beauty shots of the Mississippi River running high and proud, and the steamboats that rode along her. Will Rogers is crusty yet wise, a patented medicine salesman and riverboat captain. There's a great crowd of extras, including Eugene Palette, Lee J. Cobb, and the ever astonishing Stepin Fetchit.

Rogers' son, played by John McGuire, has gotten mixed up with a swamp girl and killed a man. This disturbs Rogers, who feels that river folk and swamp folk shouldn't mix. He orders the boy to turn himself in. The girl, Fleety Belle (!), played by the lovely Ann Shirley, rails at him, afraid that McGuire will be convicted and hanged. And when he is convicted, Roger's and Fleety Belle need to go on a river trip with a floating wax museum to raise money for a better lawyer for an appeal.

On the trip, they discover Stepin Fetchit playing Jonah in a model whale. If you've never seen his act, this is a pretty good example of it. He drawls and whines and yammers in an impenetrable dialect, while making googly eyes, and possibly shuffling a little. This kind of thing is not for everyone - I guess it's pretty racist - but it's pretty funny, and half the white folk have accents about as hard to make out.

This movie is a funny kind of mix - an old-fashioned plot that could have come from a silent melodrama along with some slow, easy humor, followed by a slapstick ending. If you can take the sentimentality (and work around the racism), you should like it. If you don't, you just don't like Will Rogers movies.

In conclusion, I did appreciate the strong stance on prejudice against swamp folk. They are human, just like river people.