CONTRARY to what the producer would like to imply, “Juke Girl” isn’t about a loose woman. It was called “Juke Girl” to get more people through the turnstiles to see Ann Sheridan, and since she had to be there once they got in, the script had to be jimmied around to take care of her. But actually it is a movie that wanted to be brave and forthright about the rotten farming conditions in the South, which also wasn’t exactly what the producer wanted; so it’s coated over with the cheap glazing of any horse opera. In fact, it is a sort of Florida “Grapes of Wrath,” with farmers and their land, their working and sweating on it and never getting anything for it, and the search of migratory workers for employment which at best pays them off in squalor and hunger.
You’d think all that was needed was a camera turning on a small town and some people. But instead it’s on a juke joint that could have been the saloon out of the last picture about Tombstone. There’s the saloon brawling, the grim, silent, two-fisted Bill Hart type, the pretty girl in a tight dress, the buddy who wasn’t really bad, just got in with the wrong crowd—a gang of rustlers—a wisecracking child and a pop-eyed superstitious Negro for laughs (make the white people laugh, the Negroes don’t have many theatres anyway).
The picture is paced wrong. It ends in the middle and then starts over again. The packing-house owners, who have been cheating the farmers, are beaten, but Miss Sheridan has to be accounted for and made happy, so off we go again. She was in love with Ronald Reagan but left him because she was tainted with jukism. So a murder happens in the end to reunite them. Then they are nearly lynched.
Here in this last episode is a good example of the cheap mind and the lazy camera behind the picture. The frenzied mob moving on the jail house is straight from Fritz Lang’s great movie “Fury.” In that picture Lang achieved a terrible reality of ordinary people united for human destruction. It was done with a camera that moved as a person within the mob, showing bits of significant action—ringleaders, bystanders there for fun being swept up into the hysteria, little boys acting big, righteous women, and on the inside the terror and panic. The same thing takes place in “Juke Girl,” except that the camera is set down stock still on the steps of the jail and shows 500 movie extras walking toward it. On the inside are Ann and Ronald, cool as cucumbers, babbling something about how funny life is. The crowd comes in, takes them out, and that’s all. Nothing was tried and nothing was gained (though Forbstein’s musical accompaniment really got mad). It’s the difference between illustration and expression.
The picture is the most belligerent thing you’ve ever seen. Seven main bouts, two prelims, and a snarling, loudmouthed atmosphere. The funniest fight is one with Gene Lockhart up against the wall and someone whaling the living daylights out of him with the palms of his hands.
As for the players, they did creditably what they were told to do. Mr. Reagan and Miss Sheridan, who made “Kings Row” feel inside your stomach, are fine to look at, with the natural freshness that makes good movie playing a joy to see. Stage-actor Richard Whorf still does most of his acting with his mouth, and there is a repeat performance for Gene Lockhart’s cowardly villain.
The thing is, what do juke girls, cowboy stuff and murders have to do with a social study of farmers? It’s a cheap way of avoiding something especially important at the same time that you’re facing it.
July 6, 1942