A Connecticut Yankee

William Penn Adair Rogers (1879-1935), born in Oklahoma when it was still Indian Territory, was part Cherokee. He also was America's most beloved humorist for years before he died in a plane crash in Alaska, a star of vaudeville, Broadway, radio, movies and, for good measure, a widely syndicated newspaper columnist. His Cherokee heritage may have contributed to the everyman outsider stance that gave underpinning to his gentle wisecracks, full of populist keenness. When he said things like, "My ancestors may not have come over on the Mayflower, but they met 'em at the boat," it was shorthand for the way he bonded with audiences by reminding them that he, like they, were on the outside of the power structure, but it didn't mean they couldn't poke fun at it. He could have been Mark Twain's gentler sibling. He teamed up with Twain, sort of, in a 1931 film of Twain's 1889 time-travel fantasy, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, shortened to A Connecticut Yankee. Rogers, a real cowboy who grew up on his family's ranch, began his showbiz career in Wild West shows as a lariat virtuoso, worked jokes into his routines, much as W.C. Fields, who began as a juggler, did. By the time of A Connecticut Yankee, Rogers had dozens of films under his belt, some with such self-descriptive titles as Cupid the Cowpuncher (1920), The Ropin' Fool (1922) and The Cowboy Sheik (1924). People loved his barbed but never vitriolic one-liners delivered in an aw-shucks hayseed fashion that blinded nobody to their shrewd, bemused skepticism - a quality that never fails to win American audiences, especially when applied to so-called political life. He and his cowboy persona were relaxed and comfortable. They relocated easily from the bunkhouse of a ranch to a Main Street storefront in Connecticut, where his character, Hank Martin, runs a radio shop, houses the local radio station and fronts the programs in cracker-barrel fashion. One stormy night, Hank gets a call to deliver a car-sized radio battery to a spooky stone mansion on a hill. There he meets a stone-faced butler, an imperious lady of the house, her daughter, whose engagement to a boy she considers plebian she opposes, and the dotty paterfamilias, an inventor who needs the big battery to test his belief that he can tune in on the past. No sooner do Hank and the old inventor hear voices from King Arthur's time than a French window blows open, knocking over a suit of armor, which lands on Hank, conking him out. The framing device then yields to the story within a story, which has fun with the idea of modern inventions transplanted to 528 A.D. "Canst tellest me where the hellest I am?" Hank drawls to the knight who drags him in chains to Camelot's round table. When he dazzles the court by producing instant fire from his cigar lighter, the jealous Merlin (Brandon Hurst), seeing the newcomer as a rival, sells Arthur on the idea of burning Hank at the stake. A Connecticut Yankee takes a lot of liberties with the book, an approach that works disarmingly, reinforcing the idea that we're watching something freewheeling and zany. More important than not taking the book totally seriously, the film's eight writers convince us that we're watching a film that never takes itself too seriously, befitting a dream. Its structure, such as it is, fits Rogers's casual style comfortably as Hank's dozing mind recasts the mansion's denizens into Camelot's principals. Thus the inventor (William Farnum) is transformed into Arthur, the unreceptive butler (Mitchell Harris) becomes a hostile knight, the high-handed lady (Myrna Loy) is reincarnated into Arthur's evil sister, Morgan Le Fay, while the lovelorn ingénue from the mansion (Maureen O'Sullivan) becomes the high-born lady forbidden from marrying the commoner in both worlds (Frank Albertson). The latter figures in one of the asides: Hank gets the young man upgraded to royal rank, having him dubbed Sir Rogers de Claremore (a genuflection to Rogers's Oklahoma home town). Hank's turnaround is launched by the book's juiciest scene. Just before Hank is about to be burned, he learns from the handy-dandy pocket almanac he carries that June 21, 528 A.D. - the date of his scheduled execution - was also the date of a solar eclipse. Surrounded by kindling, he proclaims his intention to blot out the sun. When it happens, Hank's fortunes soar as he pretends to make the sun reappear. Dubbed Sir Boss by the impressionable Arthur, he swings into 20th century action, including taking on the enemy knight in a joust, exchanging lance and armor for cowboy hat and chaps, then lassoing his adversary to the ground. After proclaiming himself a Democrat in favor of prosperity, farm relief, freedom for Ireland and beer for all, Hank sets about industrializing Camelot along modern lines. In no time, the screen is filled with switchboard operators in medieval garb, mass-produced miscellany and an assembly line of which Henry Ford would have been proud. Then, in a meeting of minds with Twain, Rogers announces that he's inventing advertising in order to make people want what they had been perfectly happy without. Twain's vernacular is right in Rogers's wheelhouse, and he makes the delivering of it seem easy. His offhand manner encourages receptivity to the film's absurdities, not that the glut of 20th century stuff his Camelot factories turn out doesn't come in handy. When Hank and Arthur learn Morgan Le Fay has, with the help of a treacherous Merlin, kidnapped the princess, and they ride off to rescue her only to wind up on the gallows, about to be hanged, the Camelot cavalry comes to the rescue. In a scene of delightful excess, a fleet of flivvers bounces over the enemy turf, augmented by tanks, planes and a helicopter that bombs Morgan Le Fay's castle to rubble. It enables the film to end on a bang-up note of rising nonsense, with everybody, including the deadpan baddies, drawing us into the good time they convince us they're having. While such veterans as Farnum and Hurst are the means of poking gentle fun at old styles steeped in the staginess that often spilled over into early talkies, Ireland's O'Sullivan brings youthful freshness to a stock ingénue role, and Loy is a delight. Cast in a string of troublemaker roles at that early stage of her career, she brings a playful sexiness to Morgan Le Fay, even in the improbable scenes in which she's supposed to have fallen for Hank and romances him in a good-humored vampish way. Neither she nor Rogers could have known that she'd also bring a dash of color to those scenes. Director David Butler had the idea to have Hank's face hand-tinted pink in every frame of every print of their love scene, and so it was. (Loy later wrote that Rogers was essentially a shy man in real life.) A Connecticut Yankee may look slapdash - at times its action, especially when played out against obviously painted flat backgrounds, is only a notch or two above Three Stooges production values. But its winning goofiness conceals a lot of professional savvy, not least of all from Rogers, whose homespun awkwardness and slightly nasal twang may have begun as the real thing, but by 1931 belonged to the realm of the art that concealed art. Director: David Butler Screenplay: William M. Conselman, Owen Davis, based on the novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain Cinematography: Ernest Plamer Art Direction: William S. Darling Music: Arthur Kay Film Editing: Irene Morra Cast: Will Rogers (Hank Martin aka Sir Boss), William Farnum (King Arthur/Inventor), Frank Albertson (Emile le Poulet/Clarence), Maureen O'Sullivan (Alisande/Clarence's Sweetheart), Brandon Hurst (Merlin/Doctor in Mansion), Myrna Loy (Queen Morgan le Fay/Evil Sister in Mansion), Mitchell Harris (Sagramor/Butler in Mansion). BW-95m. by Jay Carr Sources: IMDb AFI Catalogue of Feature Films Will Rogers: A Biography, by Donald Day, David McKay, 1962 Will Rogers, Performer, by Richard J. Maturi and Mary Buckingham Maturi, McFarland, 1999 Will Rogers in Hollywood, by Bryan B. Sterling and Frances N, Sterling, Crown, 1984 Will Rogers Biography, by Joseph H. Carter, www.willrogers.com Myrna Loy: Being and Becoming, by James Kotsilibas-Davis & Myrna Loy, Knopf, 1987 The Films of Myrna Loy, by Lawrence J. Quirk, Citadel Press, 1980 Maureen O'Sullivan: "No Average Jane," by David Fury, Artist's Press, 2007