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1940
2/5
This movie is notable mainly for having Buster Keaton in it, though the character he plays is unfortunate. He plays Lonesome Polecat, a racist Native American stereotype that was a character from the comic. He's dumb, lazy, and can't read, though that doesn't necessarily distinguish him that much from the rest of the townspeople in Dogpatch. The one thing that does is his racist stereotypical dialect, with many an "um" added to the end of various words for no discirnible reason.
This is one of the major problems of the movie. It's very faithful to the source material as far as the speech and dialect is concerned, not just in the case of Lonesome Polecat, but also for Abner, Daisy, and the others. In the comic, Al Capp, the cartoonist, wrote out a strange approximation of Appalachian dialect that had nothing to do with the way real people speak in the South. As someone who grew up in the South hearing real Southern accents, I can't say I see the resemblance. This is doubly bad in this movie, since not only is the dialect from the comic recreated for the actors to speak, but none of them seem to be able to do a proper accent. It already sounds ridiculous, and they make it sound even more so by just sounding like they're all from California.
There are some nose and chin prosthetics given to the actors to make them look more like their comic counterparts, though not every actor gets them, so it feels a bit like the various actors are supposed to be in two different movies.
The physical comedy, for the most part, is good. I wish there was more of it, especially for Buster Keaton to do. The "jokes" aren't really that funny at all, and mostly revolve around the ignorance or stupidity of the people involved, expecting us to point and laugh at the simple folk and their simple ways.
After some "comedic" vignettes at the beginning of the movie, the plot gets going when Abner eats a sandwich that gives him a stomachache, prompting him to go see a barber, thinking he's a doctor, who tells him he has "scrombosis" and tells him he only has 24 hours to live. Abner also doesn't like kissing women or getting married, but he figures if he's about to die he might as well, so he proposes to Daisy Mae. He also worries about what will happen to his parents after he's dead, so he decides to go catch the notorious robber on the wanted posters and collect the $25 reward to give to his parents. Having no fear for his life due to thinking he will be dead the next day, he fights the giant man, knocks him out, and carries him out of the bank he was trying to rob. It causes a riot outside, and a woman offers to help him escape and bring the man to the police, but only if Abner will promise to marry her the next day. Again, thinking he'll be dead then, he agrees. He goes to sleep next to a tree, and upon waking believes he's in heaven, though he soon realizes this is not true and goes back to town. Both women arrive expecting to marry him and each is understandably upset that the other is there. Fortunately, the next day is the Sadie Hawkins Race, where any unmarried woman can marry any unmarried man that she wants as long as she can catch him. The mayor decrees that Abner is reserved for only the two women to chase. Daisy Mae of course ends up catching him first, despite him trying to disguise himself as an old woman, and his father breaking the robber out of jail in order to disrupt the race. And I guess that counts as a happy ending.
On the whole, I wouldn't say it's *bad*, per se, just kind of mediocre. I've never been a fan of the comic, so that may color my opinion a bit. If you are a fan of the comic, you might like it. If you aren't, you'll probably just find it boring, apart from a slight chuckle here and there.