Mississippi (Paramount, 1935)

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

Last Sunday night Charles and I watched the last two films from the W. C. Fields Comedy Collection that we hadn’t seen in a while – at least not since I’ve been doing the moviemagg blog. One was Mississippi, a production from 1935 that sought to unite two of Paramount’s biggest stars, Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields, in a bizarre tale of love and honor in the Old American South. The story began life as a play by Booth Tarkington in 1904 called Magnolia and had previously been filmed as a 1924 silent called The Fighting Coward, directed by James Cruze and starring Cullen Landis and the great silent character villain Ernest Torrence in the parts played here by Crosby and Fields, respectively. I hadn’t seen Mississippi since the 1970’s, when I watched it under the auspices of the San José station Channel 36 (the channel on which I first saw many of the classic Paramount comedies of Fields, the Marx Brothers and Mae West), and I misremembered the movie: I thought Fields’ character had appeared only in the middle third of the movie when in fact he’s in the opening scene (he’s steering a show boat through the Mississippi River and periodically using his tongue to flip up his cigar so it doesn’t get in the way of the spokes of the boat’s steering wheel) and his part runs throughout. The film’s credits list Crosby, Fields and Joan Bennett, in that order, and that’s a pretty good indication of their relative importance in the story. The plot deals with Tom Grayson (Bing Crosby), a Philadelphia Quaker who has traveled South and become engaged to Elvira Rumford (Gail Patrick), only at the lavish party thrown to announce their engagement Grayson is challenged to a duel by Major Patterson (John Miljan), a rival for Elvira’s affections.

Being a Northerner, a Quaker and someone who thinks the whole idea of the code duello and the “honor” supposedly behind it is ridiculous, Grayson declines the challenge – and Elvira’s father, General Rumford (Claude Gillingwater), angrily declares that Grayson has dishonored not only himself but the entire Rumford family in refusing Patterson’s challenge. Instead the hot-headed Patterson fights a duel with his brother Joe (Edward Pawley) after Grayson is told that between them the Patterson brothers have killed 40 people. Major Patterson either kills or wounds his brother (it’s not clear which) and, with nowhere else to go, Grayson joins the troupe of the show boat commanded by Commodore Jackson (W. C. Fields). (In Tarkington’s original story the hero who refuses to duel was a distant cousin of the Rumfords and had been born in the South but raised in Philadelphia.) The only person on the Rumford plantation who sticks up for Grayson is Elvira’s sister Lucy (Joan Bennett), who’s proud of Grayson for sticking up for his ideals even though it cost him his fiancée as well as his “honor” with the Southern stuffed shirts. When Grayson joins the show boat (which incorrectly is depicted the way show boats were in the 1936 and the 1951 films of Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic musical Show Boat, as a self-propelled steamboat: the real show boats were barges, moved by something called a “tow boat” which, despite the name, actually was behind the show boat, pushing it up and down the river; the 1929 Show Boat film and Abbott and Costello’s 1945 vehicle The Naughty Nineties got it right) he walks into the middle of a poker game.

Given that W. C. Fields is the dealer, and just about everyone at the table is at least as crooked as he is, he has dealt himself four aces and three of the four other players are holding four aces each. (We’ve seen one reach into his jacket pocket and slip out four aces which he adds to his hand, but we have no idea how Jackson and the other characters are cheating.) When Jackson, already getting antsy at the number of people at the table who have four aces, nervously picks a draw card and it’s yet another ace, one of the other players challenges him and threatens to shoot him. Grayson intervenes with the other man and They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his third Duesenberg), resulting in Grayson accidentally killing the other man. Jackson decides to promote him as “Col. Steele, the Singing Killer,” and through that moniker he achieves fame on the riverboat and all the girls he can handle, as everyone wants to get to know him and every woman wants to debate the notorious “singing killer.” The boat returns to the town where the Rumfords have their plantation, and Lucy – who’d continually been writing Grayson at his Philadelphia address, only to get the letters returned as undeliverable – sees what “Steele” has become and wants nothing to do with him. Grayson tries to explain that he’s never killed anybody – at least on purpose – but to no avail. In the end, though, it all turns out happily and Grayson and Lucy pair up and leave the South for good.

Mississippi is an odd film, one of those I like to call the “portmanteau movie” because it seems the filmmakers were bound and determined to crowd in everything that might appeal to a potential moviegoer: a romantic Southern setting (beautifully staged by director A. Edward Sutherland – a far more creative filmmaker than Fields usually got on his projects; they’d worked together before in some of Fields’ silent features as well as International House, and Sutherland would work with Fields once more on Poppy, the 1936 sound version of Fields’ 1923 stage musical – and lavishly photographed by cinematographers Charles Lang and an uncredited Karl Struss), a plot of love lost and new love gained, great songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“It’s Easy to Remember” has become a standard and “Soon” probably would have if it hadn’t had to compete with George Gershwin’s earlier song of the same title) as well as Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (which is described as a new song in the dialogue – Fields’ character hears it, thinks it’s going to be a flop because nobody will be able to remember it, then starts humming it himself – which, since the song is from 1851, is the only time clue we get as to when this movie takes place), and some of Fields’ most brilliant comedy. It’s also a handsomely produced movie, even though it only runs an hour and 14 minutes (about the usual length of a programmer then but oddly short for a film with a significant production budget and two stars – though I suspect some of the plantation sets were recycled from King Vidor’s So Red the Rose, a 1935 Civil War drama which flopped but Vidor claimed it had the same plot as Gone With the Wind).

Working from a committee-written script (imdb.com lists Herbert Fields and Claude Binyon with “adaptation,” Fields and an uncredited Dore Schary as “contributors to treatment,” and Francis Martin – the very interesting director and co-writer of Fields’ previous film Tillie and Gus – and Jack Cunningham for the screenplay), Sutherland and his cinematographers fill the screen with lovely, dappled Southern vistas and early on in the film track the camera through the Rumford manse in a long moving-camera shot similar to those Alfred Hitchcock would use later, discovering various characters and their intrigues along the way. As I said when I reviewed the Sutherland-Fields Poppy for moviemagg, it’s fascinating how Fields’ films for Paramount (especially the ones with period settings, like The Old-Fashioned Way, Mississippi and Poppy) often had marvelous production values while the ones he made for Universal between 1939 and 1941 are flatly photographed in bright sunlight with almost no attempts at cinematic atmosphere. Bing Crosby is in prime voice and is especially good when he sings the Foster song at the Rumford plantation with a backing chorus of Black slaves. Oddly, his rendition of “It’s Easy to Remember” isn’t the lovingly phrased ballad one would think he would have given us with this song; instead, spotted in the plot just after he and Bennett have had an argument about his “Singing Killer” image, it buzzes with anger – one of the rare times Bing sought to act with a song by the way he sang it instead of just using that gloriously honeyed voice to croon it. I found myself liking Mississippi better than I had before – yes, all that patronizing racial crap gets wearing after a while (the film treats its Black characters basically as spoiled children), but the romance, music and comedy actually come together and blend as well, a testament to the skill of Sutherland’s direction (unlike a lot of Fields directors, he did not do just comedy: just before International House he had directed a thriller called Secrets of the French Police and a horror film called Murders in the Zoo that still packs a wallop today!) and the writers in bringing all those disparate elements together into a pleasingily entertaining whole.