Doubting Thomas

Ziegfeld Follies headliner Will Rogers jumped at the opportunity to make motion pictures, mostly because Samuel Goldwyn, with whom he signed his first film contract in 1918, offered to raise his weekly salary from $1,000 to $2,000 (with a promise of $3,000 per week after a year) and provided the genial humorist with a stable for his horses on the studio back lot. Growing steadily more comfortable with the medium of moving (and later talking) pictures after his first Hollywood film, Jubilo (1919), Rogers eventually took a proactive hand in writing and producing his own vehicles, though he never adjusted to the business of studio contracts. When Rogers signed with the Fox Film Corporation in 1930, he balked at having to read the plethora of attached pages handed to him by studio executive (and personal friend) Winfield Sheehan, preferring to simply write on the back of the document "I haven't read this thing but if Winnie Sheehan says it's all right, that's good enough for me." Moving forward, Fox released Rogers from the burden of having to read or sign contracts and a gentleman's agreement remained in place until Roger's untimely death in 1935. In January of that year, Rogers had agreed to a ten-picture deal with the cash-strapped studio (soon to merge with Twentieth Century Pictures to form 20th Century-Fox), brokering for himself a then-estimable $1.1 million in the bargain. (In 1933, Rogers enjoyed the distinction of being Hollywood's highest-paid movie star and earned more per picture than the President of the United States made in a year.) He completed four films through the summer before a combination of restlessness, cabin fever and the calling of his innate pioneer spirit inspired him to join aviator Wiley Post on an Alaskan junket to chart a potential mail and passenger route between the western United States and Russia. On August 15th, the hybrid plane bearing Post and Rogers to Alaska's Point Barrow nosedived into a lagoon, killing both men instantly. Five weeks earlier, Fox had premiered Rogers' comedy Doubting Thomas (1935), the last of his films released in his lifetime. The storyline features a husband who makes fun of his wife's theatrical aspirations when she agrees to appear in a local production. When she begins to spend less time at home than on the stage, he decides to retaliate by becoming an actor himself. Doubting Thomas was adapted from George Kelly's Broadway smash The Torch Bearers, which ran for 130 performances at New York's 48th Street Theater in 1922. Monastic in his habits and aloof in his society, Kelly shied away from publicity but used the theatre as a bulwark against the worldly sins of loose morality and bourgeois pretention. (In many of his theatre pieces, Kelly upheld the sanctity of marriage but remained throughout his long life a confirmed bachelor.) The playwright had honed his craft in Vaudeville; his 1919 sketch Mrs. Ritter Appears planted the seed for The Torch Bearers, a caustic spoof of the Little Theatre Movement (which flourished between the world wars) and an indirect dig at the Women's Rights Movement (which had secured for American women the right to vote two years earlier). Featured in the Broadway production, which Kelly directed himself, was Alison Skipworth, who would reprise her role as the grandly deluded theatrical doyenne Mrs. Pampinelli in Fox's Doubting Thomas twelve years later. There is no public record of George Kelly's reaction to the casting of Will Rogers in Doubting Thomas but the two men could not have been more dissimilar in their temperaments or politics. Unlike Rogers, who used his syndicated newspaper column and frequent radio appearances to speak his mind on all manner of subjects, from politics to the books he was reading, Kelly was an intensely private man who permitted no interviews and discouraged biographers. While Rogers had supported the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the ultra-conservative Kelly despised The New Deal and branded FDR as "the Great Knave." Despite winning the 1926 Pulitzer Prize for drama (Craig's Wife was adapted for the cinema three times, most recently in 1950 as Harriet Craig, starring Joan Crawford), Kelly fell from favor with the critics and abandoned the theatre to write for film and television. He is best remembered nearly forty years after his death for being the uncle of actress Grace Kelly, who made her own stage debut in a production of The Torch Bearers at Pennsylvania's Bucks County Playhouse in 1949. Producer: Buddy G. DeSylva Director: David Butler Screenplay: William M. Conselman, Bartlett Cormack, based on the play The Torch Bearers by George Kelly Cinematography: Joseph A. Valentine Art Direction: Jack Otterson Music: Arthur Lange Costume Design: René Hubert Cast: Will Rogers (Thomas Brown), Billie Burke (Paula Brown), Alison Skipworth (Mrs. Pampinelli), Sterling Holloway (Mr. Spindler), Andrew Tombes (Hossefrosse), Gail Patrick (Florence McCrickett), Frances Grant (Peggy Burns). BW-73m. by Richard Harland Smith SOURCES: American Original: A Life of Will Rogers by Ray Robinson (Oxford University Press, 1996) Will Rogers: A Biography by Ben Yagoda (University of Oklahoma Press, 2000) Will Rogers by Betty Rogers (University of Oklahoma Press, 1941) "George Kelly, the Man" by William B. Lynch, Three Plays by George Kelly (Limelight Editions, 2004)