Steamboat Round the Bend (1935)

An odd second film for the Fox Collection, this is the story of a snake-oil salesman/decrepit riverboat owner whose protégé kills a man in self-defense, and the double race to find the witness who can prove his innocence added to a literal race, born out of a simple boast to a rival, in which ownership of the boat itself is at stake.

Frankly, the only value I see is that the film is a vehicle for Will Rogers, someone not often remembered today for his film work, (Connecticut Yankee is what immediately comes to mind, but not much else.)

I suppose the race in which one of the participants is late and unable to stock enough fuel and in which its furniture, a full waxwork exhibit and eventually the ship itself becomes the fuel (and that is still not enough) is not only memorable enough but a good metaphor for a great many things, but neither seems culturally significant enough.

Maybe the pickings were slim in 1935; not that I mind, I’d rather have gotten a film I was not familiar with than something widely available or that I'd already had seen.

Directed by John Ford, with Anne Shirley, Irvin S. Cobb, Eugene Pallette, John McGuire, Berton Churchill and Stepin Fetchit.