THE STORY OF WILL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 735, 14 August 1953, Page 18

THE STORY OF WILL

"ROGERS (Warner Bros.) O use one slim monosyllable to describe two pictures may | seem perilously like cheeseparing, and to describe a 10,000 foot screen biography of Will Rogers, plus a Jane Russell pro"duction, as slight may seem grotesque. But slight is, I'm sure, the mot juste for the week’s films, even if it means only half a mot apiece. Those who can remember seeing Will Rogers himself on the screen-and there must be many of us still around-will, I think, suffer in some measure that inevitable disappointment. which follow’s an inadequate evocation of times past. Those to whom Will Rogers meant nothing at all may well wonder why America made such a fuss of him. And yet he was, in his way, a nonpareila home-spun philosopher in the days before these were two a penny; a drawiing Yankee humorist in the genuine Mark Twain tradition, almost completely unspoiled by formal education yet a shrewd commentator on life and living: "I never met a man I didn't like," he once said, but liking was too weak a word to describe the feeling he aroused in most Americans. With his innate simplicity and fundamental mother-wit he could have been the prototype, or the ideal, of that Common Man to whom Henry Wallace dedicated this present. century. But unless you do a bit of eking out on your own, you won't extract all that from this Technicolored beatification (complete with coda by Hollywood's celestial choir). Paradoxically, the film is weak where I imagine the studio thought it most strong. Old Will is played by his son, Will Rogers, Jr., whose obvious (and quite natural) desire to deal fairly with Paw damps down the humour and introduces a_ note of sobriety and earnestness that at times sorts oddly with the subject. Filial piety is not enough-the near in blood, the nearer bloodless, as you might say. Not that old Will joked all the time. He was a good propagandist, though I doubt if be was urging Americans. to Remember Pear] Harbour as long before the

event as the film might lead you to believe. But he did grow up with the years. He progressed from the Cherokee Kid of the travelling circus days to the Cowboy Philosopher and the Self-Made Diplomat. Young Will never quite gets clear of the sawdust. :