Li’l Abner (1940)

Here’s the last of Buster’s late-career features that I have access to, and it’s not a particularly good one.  Granted, I’ve never read the comic strip that it’s based on (and really, any feature film based on a comic strip is probably stretching it – there’s a reason Peanuts mostly stuck to half-hour TV specials,) but there’s still not much here.  Also, it’s a film where it’s difficult to enjoy Buster’s part.

In the hillbilly town of Dogpatch, strapping young simpleton Li’l Abner spends his days getting easily confused and trying to avoid matrimonial entanglements.  One day, he has the misfortune to have two women both declaring him their betrothed, and with Sadie Hawkins Day coming up – in which all the unmarried women chase all the bachelors through town, and any woman who catches a man is entitled to marry him – he doesn’t like his odds.

Again, I don’t know much of anything about the comic strip, although I’m guessing the movie’s visuals are pretty accurate:  the giant fake noses on Li’l Abner’s parents and the overall look of comic sidekick Hairless Joe are very cartoony, so I’m assuming the film basically brings the comic strip to life.  For a seventy-five-minute string of hillbilly jokes, stupid jokes, and marriage jokes, it’s cute enough but incredibly lightweight.  It did occur to me that Li’l Abner’s characterization of running away from women is similar to Jughead’s longtime M.O. in Archie comics, and I amused myself by imagining Li’l Abner as ace (although he seems to like Daisy Mae fairly well – it’s more just that he doesn’t want to be a husband.)

Like Pajama Party, this is another unpleasant case of Buster playing a Native American, in this case the supporting character Lonesome Polecat.  I wouldn’t say the film leans into the stereotypes quite as hard as the Pajama Party does, but it’s still uncomfortable to see.  That said, he isn’t in it much.  Mainly, he’s in a short comic bit at the beginning of the film and is featured more in the Sadie Hawkins Day sequence, where both he and Hairless Joe are thwarted in their attempts to get snagged by a woman (as opposed to all the other guys, who are trying to run away from them.)

If there’s an upside, it’s that it has me thinking more about race in Buster’s silent work.  I’ve discussed before that there’s certainly some unpleasant humor to be found there – I don’t want to excuse any of the insensitive jokes in his films – and he took his own turn at “Indian humor” in The Paleface.  That said, I’d say both Li’l Abner in 1940 and Pajama Party in 1964 are more racist than anything Buster made in the 1920s.  And since I can’t imagine Hollywood in the ‘20s was less racist than it was in the ‘40s or ‘60s, then it’s likely that Buster’s classic works aren’t nearly as racist as they could have been, and I’d guess we have Buster to thank for that.  That’s a very weird sort of faint praise, but given the times, I do think it’s something worth crediting.

On another note, this is going to be my last Buster Monday post.  Not that I’m done writing about him!  I’m going to keep up the 100 Years of Buster Keaton write-ups, and I’ll post anything else that strikes me, but after about three years and over 150 posts, I’m just running out of stuff to write about him every single week.  It’s been super fun, and again, Buster Keaton posts will keep coming, just not quite as frequently.

Warnings

Drinking/smoking, a little slapstick violence, and unfortunate racial stereotypes.