BIBLIOGRAFÍA

With their Appalachian setting and dramatic subjects, Mountain Justice and Valley of the Tennessee were clearly the exception that proved the rule of the gravitational shift beginning around 1936 in movie house portrayals of moun-tain people from Appalachia to the Ozarks and from serious social drama to musical comedy and rustic farce—a transition that paralleled the celebration of “the folk” at a time of anti-fascism and New Deal populism. Although the total number of films set in the southern mountains or based on the hill folk declined dramatically in each successive decade after 1920, the percentage of comic portrayals within this genre steadily grew, from 14 percent of 1920s films, to 42 percent of the 1930s movies, to 63 percent of 1940s films. The Ozark setting of nearly all these comic films reflected not only the long time association between the region and parodic portrayals of mountaineer but also the increasingly troubled portrayal of Appalachia in national press ac-counts. As the southeastern mountains became defined as a land of violent coal strikes, human suffering, and, more positively, as the site of large-scale government works programs, it grew more difficult for national film audi-ences to maintain their conception of the region as a land beyond the realm of social and economic reality. Conversely, it was far easier for film produc-ers and viewproduc-ers to define the Ozarks, which lacked similar large-scale extrac-tive industries and government programs, as a mythic space inhabited by out-landishly caricatured men and women.²⁹

The most immediate cause of the new filmic emphasis on the Ozarks, however, was that it was the home of nearly all of the rural humorists from the vaudeville stage and network radio who collectively starred in these pro-ductions. Bob Burns, a native of Van Buren, Arkansas, and the star of four films for Paramount between 1937 and 1940, dubbed himself “the Arkansas Traveller” and was best known for his “invention” of a musical contraption he called a “bazooka” (a name later applied to the similar-looking World War II anti-tank weapon). Chester Lauck and Norris Goff—the stars of the radio program Lum and Abner that ran an astonishing twenty-four years (1931–1955) and a half-dozen films based on these characters—both grew up in Mena, Arkansas and set their Jot ’Em Down general store in the mythical Ozark hill town of Pine Ridge. Frank, Leon, and June Weaver, better known as the Weaver Brothers and Elviry, came from Springfield, Missouri, and had been the preeminent “rube” vaudevillians of the 1910s and 1920s. Blending coun-try humor and music with folksy morality tales, they starred in twelve films between 1930 and 1943. Of the leading rural clowns of films of this era, only

Judy Canova, “the hillbilly canary,” who starred in at least seventeen films be-tween 1940 and 1955, was not from the Ozarks.³⁰

These performers’ leap to the big screen was a result not only of the vogue for all things hillbilly in the mid- to late 1930s but also of the advent of the “B movie”—highly formulaic low-budget films produced by lower tier studios such as Republic Pictures, as well as larger film companies includ-ing Paramount and Columbia, and intended to be the bottom half of a dou-ble-feature presentation. Searching for a way to offset the cost of big-budget productions and recognizing that the vast and still expanding film audience (estimated to be 75 million a week by 1940 and 100 million per week by 1946

—an astonishing two-thirds of the national population) increasingly de-manded an entire afternoon’s or evening’s entertainment, studios developed the double-feature in the mid-1930s, as a means of giving the audience twice the entertainment with a minimal increase in production costs. By 1936, double-bills were a staple of 85 percent of all movie houses, and lower tier studios such as Republic Pictures and Monogram were producing almost exclusively

“B” films. The majority of these, including gangster and crime dramas and romantic serials, were mainly aimed at the expanding urban audience. Re-public and similar studios produced the hillbilly and rural musical comedies discussed here, however, primarily for the rural and small-town market, which steadily supported this genre from the mid-1930s into the mid-1950s.³¹ Many of these films featured little more than cartoon hillbillies brought to life such as those in Kentucky Moonshine. The Bob Burns vehicles Moun-tain Music (1937) and Comin’ round the MounMoun-tain (1940) and the Weaver Brothers and Elviry’s first film, Swing Your Lady (1937), were merely a col-lection of stereotypes in the style of Paul Webb, featuring what Comin’ Round the Mountain touted as “the only surviving species of the genus homus hill-billicus Americanious.” Held together by the flimsiest of plots and featuring rube comedy and countrified (but not authentic “country”) music, these films cataloged hillbilly isolation, slovenliness, and laziness. In Mountain Music, Burns plays an “afflicted” hillbilly boy, who disgraces his family by working and shaving; in both Burns’ films the setting is the town of “Monot-ony.” All three of these films overflowed with images of tattered clothes, scrag-gly beards, bare feet, and shotguns (fig. 5.9). Not surprisinscrag-gly, most film crit-ics dismissed these movies as bland and superficial (“a mild, pale hillbilly concoction” wrote Variety about Comin’ round the Mountain) and ridiculed the crude sets and costumes. Yet a few, like Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, found the genre to be “freakish fun” that offered a fascinating insight into genuine Americana.³²

The fad for such live-action hillbilly cartoons, however, was short-lived

because such characterizations offered little room for plot and character de-velopment. Burns and the Weavers soon abandoned outright hillbilly cari-catures, although their later films, such as Burns’s The Arkansas Traveller (1938) and I’m from Missouri (1939) and the Weavers’ Down in Arkansaw (1938), In Old Missouri (1940), Arkansas Judge (1941), and Shepherd of the Ozarks (1942), continued to feature the Ozarkian regional identity. Judy Canova’s Joan of Ozark (1942) also featured the regional label, but, except for a brief opening scene of Canova in a plaid shirt, jeans, and pigtails and bran-dishing a squirrel rifle, the plot and setting (involving Canova helping cap-ture a Nazi spy ring) had little to do with the hills.

In contrast to the negative and stereotyped images of their “hillbilly”

genre predecessors, these films celebrated the simple values, sincerity, and goodness of the “plain folk” and featured plots in which the hayseed protago-Figure 5.9 Shotguns, scruffy beards, and cornpone humor:

Bob Burns gives away his sister at a shotgun wedding in Mountain Music (1938). Courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

nists overcome symbolic representations of the evils of modern urban Amer-ica: pretentious big-city snobs, exploitive businessmen, and corrupt politicians.

Like Carl Sandburg’s poetic paean The People, Yes! (1936), Granville Hicks’s Popular Front manifesto I Like America (1938), the Regionalist art of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939), these storylines reflected a general celebration of the common people in American culture of these years. Far less sophisticated or influential than any of these works or even Frank Capra’s film trilogy praising the “little man” at war with vested interests, the films of the Weavers, Burns, and Canova none-theless represented the same spirit of democratic populism and national affirmation at a time when America faced the twin threats of the spread of fas-cism abroad and the ongoing Depression at home. Cosmopolitan reviewers and audiences continued to dismiss these low-budget homespun comedies and melodramas as excessively corny, but they attracted a dependable rural and small-town audience throughout the World War II era. As one astute re-viewer wrote about the Weavers’ Mountain Rhythm: “sophisticated audiences in big cities, or college towns . . . will probably laugh in the wrong places” but

“[f]olks out in the wide open spaces and in those places where they are still called ‘folks’ without pretense are going to like this picture.”³³

Perhaps another explanation for the briefness of the appeal of live-action hillbilly movies was that in terms of fully exploiting the stereotype of lazy, slovenly, and violent rustic oafs, they could not begin to compete with the string of animated cartoons of hillbilly caricatures that were a semireg-ular feature of all the major animation studios in the 1930s and war years. Di-rected by such famed animators as Fritz Freleng and Tex Avery, these car-toons mixed an array of sight gags with familiar Webb-like hillbillies. All included country music images and soundtracks, and above all, the central plot motif of the family feud, in which the animators pitted one group of hill folks against their identical-looking rivals and both against naively pacifist outsiders.

Avery’s prototypical A Feud There Was (1938) opens on a decrepit moun-tain cabin where a half-dozen hillbillies doze noisily, interrupting their slum-ber only to perform before a radio station microphone that magically de-scends from the ceiling. When their song is over, they instantly fall back to sleep. When the inevitable feud begins, the combatants blast away at each other with all manner of absurd weaponry (including a rifle with multiple triggers and a howitzer that turns a pig and chicken into ham steak and fried eggs). Their mutual hostility is exceeded only by their sheer contempt for Egghead, a predecessor of Elmer Fudd, who tries to persuade both sides to put “an end to this meaningless massacre.” His reward for his troubles is a huge fistfight with both clans. But even after Egghead emerges victorious and

walks off screen, he is shot by a silhouetted mountaineer in the “theater au-dience,” thus presenting hillbillies as irredeemably violent. An absurd exag-geration drawn from other cartoon stereotypes of the era, A Feud There Was nonetheless linked these representations to actual mountain folk by showing human characters as opposed to the barnyard animals featured in otherwise similar cartoons. It also began with a deliberately misnamed “Ripley’s Believe It or Else” segment about an actual champion hog-caller from Arkansas, de-picted as almost identical to the hillbilly characters of the cartoon. In this way, cartoonists linked in the public mind the fantasy “hillbilly” and the ac-tual inhabitants of the southern hill country.³⁴