The Modern Screen Magazine (Jun-Sep 1931)

He is, to my mind, the pioneer type. Today, he marches out on stage or screen, he soars above the common streets in airplanes, he talks, in his own fashion, over the myster'ous ether. But put him back a few generations and set him a-hunting with Daniel Boone, set him to sailing over great seas and land him on Plymouth Rock, in order that he might defend his homestead and his freedom and he would be perfectly at home. He is therefore ageless. He does not belong any more to this generation than he belongs to the generation to come or the generation which is to be. Many of our motion picture stars have become exceedingly Anglicized, in speech, in manner, in approach. This may be the Rod Colman influence, who knows? Many have gone Continental. What Chevalier and others have to do with this, I do not know. But few of our masculine picture stars have remained American, if they ever were. Rogers has remained so. He can do no other. THERE is a certain cTaze for youth, at the moment . . . for voungsters like Lew Ayres, Douglas Fairbanks, Junior, Robert Montgomery and many others. Their popularity and fan mail increases by leaps and bounds. Youth is, at the moment, brilliantly in the ascendant. Yet time alone can prove the enduring value of these charming young people to the stage and screen. Rogers is not young; he is not romantic in the accepted sense; he is certainly far from being handsome. But I have a curious notion that he will ' remain unthreatened while others will come and go. Speaking of Fairbanks, Junior, reminds me of Fairbanks, Senior. The older Fairbanks, particularly in his stage days and the days of his earlier pictures, was considered very American. That is, he played his parts and performed his antics in the very tempo of American life . . . he was quick on his feet, smiling through, undefeated, laughing, the very soul of the Go-Getter, the Young Man who gets ahead. After which, taking to the costume picture, he preferred to adapt that tempo to sheer romantic adventure. But Rogers' Americanism goes deeper than stories of Young Men Who Make a Million Over Night,or who rescue maidens in mythical kingdoms or who are magnificently acrobatic. It is an Americanism which does not at all depend upon the type of story in which he must play. An Americanism which is never all contingent upon lines or situations or temporary manifestations of "American" life. For many manifestations are temporary. We flit from one fad or fancy to the next, and resenting the European criticism that we are "commercial" we become avid in our search for "culture," so called. Rogers is completely unaffected. He is, I think, the living incarnation of what even the least sentimental of us like to think of at times, as the American Soul. And the American Soul is not necessarily a Babbitt ! WILL ROGERS is not negative. He has virtues which are not negative virtues. I doubt very much if he has vices. I am sure he has faults and that they are not negative, either. He has strength, but strength without the usual sort of dramatic trappings. When I heard that he was to do "A Connecticut Yan kee" for the screen I emitted the equivalent of three cheers and a tiger. I cannot imagine a more suitable personality for the part of the Yankee who wandered into a strange land and a stranger generation, and who set both land and generation by die ears. I understand that on the screen, as on the stage, Rogers is permitted to ad lib, when he so desires. I can fancy that, in such a case, he might slow up the dramatic action of the story, but who cares — he'd probably stimulate the mental action of his listeners. If Will Rogers is, as I imagine him to be, a bona fide hero, he is one without any borrowed fuss or feathers. He is very purely American in his type of slow wit — ■ which isn't, really, wisecracking, after all, for there is too much shrewdness in it to permit it to be a mere ephemeral spark, thrown off to get a laugh, and then fading into darkness. He is purely American in his rangy build, his pleasant, keen-eyed, lanternjawed, quite unArrow-Collar face ; and in his private life he is the type of American that, no matter what we do ourselves, we wish Rogers with Brandon Hurst in a scene from "The Connecticut Yankee." Miss Baldwin feels that there is no more suitable personality for the part of the Yankee who wandered into a strange land and stranger generation. we were — or that every single one of our friends were. I KNOW he is generous. I fancy he is thrifty. Where business is concerned I'll bet he can drive a hard, but not unjust, bargain. I imagine that he has very big loyalties and enduring friendships. I'm perfectly sure he would be a good woodsman and a good camper. And a darned good scout in every sense of the word. I don't know how much influence he has, politically, through his newspaper connections. And I sometimes think that he certainly rushes in where super-angels would fear to tread. But I have the feeling that when he scolds a little he does it with a certain understanding of human frailty and temptation. I have been listening to him, recently, over the radio, (Continued on page 119) 37