Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Paramount, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s film was a real curio: the 1934 adaptation of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. The story started life as a novel in 1901 that because the best-selling book of 1902 in the U.S. It was written by Anne Caldwell Hegan, a socialite from Louisville, Kentucky who had lived blissfully unaware of the existence of poverty until she volunteered to teach a Sunday-school class in a Louisville slum called “The Cabbage Patch” (even though, at least in the movie, no cabbages appear to be growing there). She was shocked by what she saw and, having been an inveterate storyteller since her childhood (when she would amaze her parents by telling tales she made up on the spot) and having published her first story in a local newspaper at 15, she concocted a novel about the long-suffering Mrs. Wiggs (Pauline Lord), whose husband Homer (Donald Meek) ran off to join the Klondike gold rush and left Mrs. Wiggs to raise their five children as best she could as a single mom. The Wiggs kids include two boys and three girls, and while the boys have normal names – Billy (Jimmy Butler) and Jimmy (George P. Breakston, later a producer-director of silly horror/sci-fi movies like 1962’s The Manster) – the girls are named after continents: Asia (Carmencita Johnson), Australia (Edith Fellows, who as she grew up went on to an undistinguished career as a teenager in movies like Victor Halperin’s last film, Girls’ Town, for PRC in 1942: she worked into the 1990’s and died in 2011)), and Europena (Virginia Weidler, who held her own against John Barrymore in The Great Man Votes, Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story and Bette Davis in All This, and Heaven Too before fading out and dying tragically young in 1968 at age 41). I guess the Wiggs parents tweaked the word “Europe” so all the girls’ names would end in “a.”

Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was filmed four times, twice as a silent (1914 and 1919) and twice with sound (this one from 1934 and an inexplicable remake in 1940), and while the original reviewers of this film fondly remembered the original story and its play adaptation (by Hegan, under her married name Anne Hegan Rice, and Anne Crawford Flexner) and crabbed about the alterations – notably transforming Mrs. Wiggs’ long-suffering spinster neighbor, Miss Hazy, into one of ZaSu Pitts’ typical characterizations and adding a boyfriend for her, Stubbins (W. C. Fields – we were watching this from the Fields boxed set and he’s probably the only reason anyone would want to watch this movie today), the story probably seemed dated even then. Paramount, probably wisely, kept the story in its original turn-of-the-last-century period and didn’t try to update it even though 1934 was still during the Great Depression and a lot of people were struggling to keep themselves and their families alive much the way the Wiggses were doing in the film. One odd thing about the film was who the Paramount executives who green-lighted it thought the audience would be; there were few movies made during the Depression that were actually about it – mostly the studios were giving their audiences elaborate wish-fulfillment fantasies about rich people and the lavish surroundings in which they lived, and I can imagine a lot of 1934 moviegoers deciding to bypass Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch on the idea that they didn’t need to pay money to see a film all too close to how they were actually living.

The Cabbage Patch is located in a fictional city called “Masonville” that’s quite obviously Louisville, and the only sources of income the Wiggses have are Mrs. Wiggs’ laundry business and Billy’s business collecting and selling kindling wood for fires. Only Billy’s business has nosedived because the horse the family previously owned had died, and while he’s given a new one in the opening scene, the horse is seriously ill and it’s touch-and-go whether Billy and his family can nurse it back to health so he can once again have a horse to pull his kindling-filled wagon instead of him having to carry it through the streets. The villain of the piece is Bagby (Charles Middleton), who holds a $25 note on the Wiggs’ property and is threatening to foreclose on them because a railroad wants to locate a spur on it and he can make a ton of money selling it to them if he can throw the Wiggses out of it. There are also two nice well-to-do people in the story, Lucy Olcott (Evelyn Venable) and her boyfriend Bob Redding (Kent Taylolr, two decades before he did the Boston Blackie series on TV). Lucy, who I got the impression was based on Anne Hegan Rice herself, assembles baskets for Thanksgiving consisting of turkey, mince pie and other Thanksgiving staples (the film takes place in late November and begins with the Wiggses reading to each other from the Kentucky governor’s Thanksgiving proclamation) which she intends to deliver to Masonville’s poor, definitely including the Wiggses – who are relieved to get the food because until then they thought the only thing they’d get to eat on Thanksgiving would be carrot stew. Bob, who works at the local paper, was supposed to go with Lucy on her food delivery but broke the date at the last minute because he was dealing with his alcoholic uncle (Arthur Housman, one of the movie industry’s go-to actors for drunks – though it seems weird that someone else in a W. C. Fields movie has a drinking problem!), he ended up with liquor on his own breath (courtesy of the Housman character spiking his glass of water) and Lucy angrily broke off with him when he arrived late.

The film is more a series of vignettes than a coherent story: Billy gets his horse and successfully nurses it back to health (after Bagby has threatened to charge the Wiggses $2 if it dies on their property and has to be removed), thereby restarting his kindling business. A vaudeville troupe comes to town to perform at the local opera house (an “opera house” back then meant a theatre that could produce just about any sort of show, whether it had anything to do with opera or not) and Bob scores five tickets for the Wiggses – and Bagby, in the audience, snorts that if the Wiggses have enough money for five theatre tickets they’ve surely got enough to pay the $25 they owe him for the land on which their house sits – only the Wiggses have to leave the show early because brother Jimmy is in a charity hospital suffering from a chronic cough that, all too predictably in this sort of movie, turns fatal. There’s a tear-jerking scene in which Mrs. Wiggs describes to her dying son everything that happened in the show – or at least the part of it they got to see before Bob called them out of the theatre to take them to the charity hospital he’d found for Jimmy and where he was dying. Miss Hazy essentially orders Stebbins in a book that apparently listed potential marriage partners – sort of the c. 1900 equivalent to online dating, and like the modern equivalent subject to catfishing. When Miss Hazy reads Stebbins’ biography and he’s described as “sober” and “industrious,” all we can think of today is, “Is this a W. C. Fields character she’s describing?” When he shows up he expects her to cook a fantastic meal, only she barely knows how to cook at all, so Mrs. Wiggs offers to cook for her and Billy will secretly pass the dishes through the window so Miss Hazy can serve them as her own. It’s a gimmick that’s been used in quite a few movies since, including Christmas in Connecticut (1945) – in which Barbara Stanwyck played a Martha Stewart-esque lifestyle diva who publishes fabulous recipes but can’t cook herself – though what I found myself wondering is how the dirt-poor Wiggses got the money to pay for the ingredients.

In the end Bagby arrives at the Wiggs home to foreclose, only just at that moment Mr. Wiggs shows up at last. No, he hasn’t become a gold millionaire in the Klondike – he explains that he got as far as Denver, where someone cheated him out of all his money and supplies – but Bob slips $25 in cash into the pocket of Homer Wiggs’ coat, and he retrieves it from there, saying that he bought the jacket at the Salvation Army and its previous owner must have left the money in it. I was a bit surprised that a representative from the railroad didn’t show up and make an offer to the Wiggses for their property, so they could have some money ahead and relocate to a nicer part of town, but no such luck. It occurred to me that Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was sort of The Waltons of its time – though it was made in the time The Waltons was set and presumably the Walton family could have scraped together the money to see it. (The scripts for The Waltons did occasionally mention them going to see movies of the time – one scene I particularly remember was one in which they were driving home from The Bride of Frankenstein and talking about how scared they were by it.) Whether they would have wanted to is another matter entirely; as I noted earlier, seeing a movie about people just as hard-up (if not more so) than the Waltons were might just have depressed them, and given their druthers they would probably rather have seen a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical instead. Paramount assigned William Slavens McNutt and Jane Storm to write the screenplay and put Norman Taurog on as director – I suspect because ever since he’d directed Jackie Cooper’s star-making movie Skippy (1931) he’d established a reputation as being particularly good with child actors.

It’s also a film that seems to suffer from weak casting, especially in the title role: Pauline Lord delivers the sort of beaten-down hang-dog performance the producers were probably after, but she gets wearying after a while and one wishes they had rethought the character to be feistier and put a stronger woman in the lead. As usual, the person in the cast I really felt sorry for was ZaSu Pitts, whom Erich von Stroheim thought was one of the great potential tragic actresses in Hollywood and cast her accordingly in Greed (1924), The Wedding March (1926, released 1928) and Hello, Sister!, originally called Walking Down Broadway (1932). I still think that had MGM released Greed in Rex Ingram’s three-hour cut and given it the promotion it deserved, it would have transformed Pitts’ career the way Sybil and Norma Rae did for Sally Field a half-century later – and during Mrs. Wiggs I found myself wishing Pitts had been playing the lead and Alison Skipworth could have played Miss Hazy so we’d have a fourth film co-starring her with Fields. I hadn’t seen Mrs. Wiggs since the early 1970’s, when Channel 36 in San José was showing it as part of their weekly rotation between the films of W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Mae West, and I remember how galvanic it was when Fields entered – all of a sudden the cobwebs got swept away and the film took off and flew (to mix metaphors). Fields didn’t get much to do in this movie – and his value to the production suffered because he wasn’t allowed to write his own dialogue – but he was still in relatively good shape physically (he could still do pratfalls himself instead of relying on stunt doubles as he did later), he was large but not as bloated as he became, and his raw, urban humor is definitely a welcome enlivener that cuts through all the rural-poor sentimentality.