NFR Project: 'State Fair' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘State Fair’

Dir: Henry King

Scr: Sonya Levin, Paul Green

Pho: Hal Mohr

Ed: Robert Bischoff

Premiere: Feb. 10, 1933

97 min.

My mother’s family loved this movie, as they were farmers from Iowa, exactly who this film is about. It was rare to see Hollywood tackle such a seemingly unglamorous subject. However, the novel on which the film was based was a best-seller, so the adaptation went forward.

The film plays as a kind of wish fulfillment. Here at the state fair, the grim realities of the Great Depression are not present. There is abundance, there are happy crowds. The carnival and the midway are places of exotic excitement. To farm-bound youngsters, the fair must have seemed magical.

This, the first of three film versions (Rodgers and Hammerstein created a musical version in 1945), is led by Will Rogers as the farm’s paterfamilias, Abel Frake. It’s difficult to realize just how popular the humorist Rogers was at the time. His stage appearances, newspaper columns, radio work, and finally film work made him a household name, a homespun sage who could take the mickey out of the rich and powerful.

Here, he plays himself, basically, laid-back and slyly witty. Louise Dresser ably plays his wife. Abel’s hog, Blue Boy, is in the running for the first prize at the fair. His wife’s pickles and mincemeat are in competition as well. Although the movie takes place during the run of the fair, the real subject of the film is relationships and heartbreak. The Frakes’ two nearly-grown children, played by Janet Gaynor and Norman Foster, meet and fall in love with potential partners (one encounter ends happily, the other does not). Their romantic excitement fills the film with energy.

At the end, prizes are won, hearts are broken and mended. Rarely would such a representative slice of American life be committed to film.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Three Little Pigs.