Evelyn Venable 3/5

Note: This week we are looking over some movies with Evelyn Venable. After her really hot period in 1934 and 1935, dimwit producers got it in their minds she wasn’t star material so the remainder of her career was in B-movies whose mere titles are turn-offs (North to Nome, Female Fugitive). She retired to raise a family and later became an academic at UCLA.

The County Chairman
1935 / 1:18
Tagline: “He Knew Every Family Skeleton by its First Name”
[internet archive]

In the Thirties, nostalgia for the Gay Nineties and country life were still strings to pluck so Hollywood sometimes harkened back to the turn of the century, before urbanization, industrialization, and economic expansion combined to modernize society, politics, and culture. This light comedy is set in rural Wyoming in the days when people laughed at automobiles and their drivers the same way folks laughed at cell phones and their early adopters in the 1990s (see Twister, 1994).

Will Rogers plays Jim Hackler, a wily old lawyer and political professional. His law partner and candidate for county D.A. is young Ben Harvey (Kent Taylor). Harvey’s qualities, Hackler claims, match that of a solid candidate: never been in jail, an orphan and once won an oratory contest.

The movie treats old-timey campaigning as a boring slog. Visiting low-information voters face to face in the backcountry, Harvey kisses slovenly children while Heckler charms ornery peasants that ain’t saying if they will and they ain’t saying if they won’t. Exploiting the sex appeal of politicians, Harvey flirts with a goofy young woman to get the vote of her influential father. Though Hackler cynically turns on and off a sincere quaver in his voice, he mocks overblown speech and political chestnuts, “Just ‘point with pride’ and ‘view with alarm… .’” When the opponent starts bloviating, Rogers observes sotto-voce, “Same old sheep dip.” As to end-game tactics, Hackler counsels Harvey, “Call fraud if you are defeated.”

The opposition is Elias Rigby, played by Berton Churchill who specialized in snake-oil salesmen and bent politicians. The problem is that Harvey is courting Rigby’s daughter Lucy (Evelyn Venable). Harvey wants to keep personalities out of the campaigning, but when Rigby attacks Hackler publicly, Harvey gives voice to the rumor that Rigby has cheated a poor man crippled by the gross negligence of Big Railroad out of the lion’s share of a settlement. This makes Lucy, of course, turn against Harvey and rebound to the newspaper owner-editor, the jerk with the automobile.

From a family of teachers, Evelyn Venable is persuasive as a teacher of the primary grade children. Venable radiates wholesome, sensible, and loving. In a great scene, fair and impartial Lucy is still too young to see as a ploy Hackler’s sardonic use of the truth to reach selfish goals, “Love sours if side issues are dragged in.” She is also taken in by Hackler’s silent implication that she is a hypocrite by teaching the kids “to err is human, to forgive divine” in the penmanship lesson but not forgiving Harvey when the chips are down. Hackler, with the shameless treachery of the old, employs psychological jujitsu on the idealistic girl by saying in a kind voice he understands the appeal of those with money and an automobile are better catches than a poor country lawyer like Harvey.

One of the children is played by Mickey Rooney, whose hyperactive inimitability has polarized movie-goers for going on a century. Me, I’m agin it. His surfeit of personality at such a young age is kind of dismaying but so is his diminutive size: at 15, he still easily passes as a grade school kid. One wonders if he had going on some chromosomal or hormonal thing.

The other comic relief is Sassafras who is played by – deep breath - Stepen Fetchit. The climax depends on the dyscalculia of Sassafras, in a bygone age when visual-spatial processing difficulties were still funny. And the one joke that made me laugh hinges on the stereotype of laziness. When Rogers wakes him up from sleeping in the buckboard while parked near a sheep farm, Sass says, “I started counting them sheep being dipped and done dozed off.” The shuffling gait and whining monotone haven’t aged real well, though listening through Bluetooth I found his mumbling monologues less indistinct and more comprehensible, if not any more funny or enjoyable.

This quiet leisurely movie does not feel like a satire to me because I never got the feeling the writers were exposing the follies of office seekers or holding up to ridicule the shortcomings of the process a free and happy country uses to select its leaders. For instance, in 2024 we often heard well-meaning observers deplore how political differences break up families, as if bitter arguments around holiday dinner tables were a new thing in our culture. But in this movie this phenomenon is just treated as a fact of life. The tone of the entire move is more down-to-earth than satirical. 

The writers do not exaggerate polarization and prejudice, but they ensure division keeps up a low hum in the background. The first thing the older folks notice about Harvey is that he is young so they call him “squirt.” The country people have little use for the town merchants. The sheep men want the cattle men to go away, a sentiment gladly returned. For all the slushy talk of heartland loyalty to one’s own, Hackler and Rigby are personifications of long-standing small-town feuds. They have been hostile personal and professional rivals all their lives. Of Rigby, Hackler says, “He's been talking like that 20 years and he hasn't said anything yet.” They frankly hate each other and say so.

I hadn’t seen Rogers in a movie since the classic State Fair many years ago. I had forgotten his style was so natural, how unique his voice and screen presence were. His character is clearly country but he is not gruff like Ward Bond, smarmy like Buddy Ebsen, or seething like Walter Brennan. This was the second of two movies Rogers and Venable worked together. On the set of David Harum, Venable met her husband Hal Mohr, a respected cinematographer who won an Oscar for his work on the 1935 film A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Phantom of the Opera in 1943. They had two daughters and they stayed together 40 years until his death in 1974.