Judge Priest
By Jean-Pierre Coursodon

"The war between the states was over, but its tragedies and comedies haunted every grown man's mind…" — Irvin S. Cobb, Judge Priest's opening credits.

The second of three films starring Will Rogers which Ford directed in 1933-35 (Rogers died in a plane crash shortly after the third one, Steamboat Round the Bend, was completed), Judge Priest (1934) is Ford's nostalgic return to the past after a series of contemporary movies, a Fordian version of the studio's trademark Americana. Set in a small (unnamed) Kentucky town in 1890, it is loosely based on three "Judge Priest" tales by Irvin S. Cobb, to which Ford's writers, Dudley Nichols and Lamar Trotti, brought some of their own inventions (including several important characters). Although the action takes place twenty-five years after the war ended, its "tragedies and comedies" are still very much alive in "grown men's minds" and their memories actually provide much of the plot's material.

Like many Ford movies, Judge Priest somewhat awkwardly yet efficiently mixes light (or sometime not-so-light) comedy and melodramatic elements. In that spirit, the film begins and ends with courtroom sequences of a quite different nature. The opening sequence is a comic "trial" revolving around the alleged theft of a chicken, while the final trial involves an accusation of brutal assault and battery; in the course of the proceedings it will be revealed that orphaned Ellie Mae — the film's "love interest," courted by Priest's young nephew Jerome — is actually the accused's daughter. In both cases the defendant turns out to be innocent, although the way innocence is established blithely ignores due process, courtroom procedure and the letter of the law (which, Priest reminds us at one point, is less important to him than its spirit). The use and abuses of the law are frequent themes of Ford's movies, which often deal with unfairly harsh sentences and miscarriages of justice.

When the film opens, in Priest's courtroom, the accused, a black man (the inimitable[1] Stepin Fetchit) described by the prosecution as a vagrant ("He cometh from no man knows whence") is asleep on a bench, while the judge is reading the comics section of the newspaper (a full-page "Yellow Kid") and a trio of veterans, who comprise the entire audience, argue about their conflicting memories of various Civil War battles. Meanwhile the prosecutor, ex-state senator Horace Maydew, speechifies in a stentorian voice, demanding that the chicken thief ("a menace to our God-fearing community") be condemned to six months on a chain gang.

Judge Priest, however, is more interested in finding out how the accused, Jeff Poindexter, got his name (which brings up memories of the war, as Jeff was "named" by a confederate officer, Randolph "Ranny" Poindexter).[2] Then Priest wants to know about the bait Jeff uses to catch catfish (it's beef liver). When Jeff says that he caught a fish "that long," Maydew exclaims: "That proves he is lying!" — although it rather tends to suggest that the prosecution's case is not all that strong. The judge clearly doesn't take Maydew's accusation seriously. Ford doesn't bother to show Priest rendering a judgement; he simply cuts from the bait and battles discussion to a shot of the judge and Jeff walking away down a shady lane toward Sleepy River (where the catfish is plenty, we've heard), their fishing poles on their shoulders ("an overgrown version of Huck and Jim," Scott Eyman suggests in his Ford biography).

Having saved Jeff from the chain gang, Priest proceeds to make him his sidekick and factotum. In a scene deleted by the studio (it is not clear whether it was shot or not) the judge also saved Jeff from a lynching mob, a striking instance of the wide range from comedy to drama Ford films could cover.[3] (Ford was to use the lynching scene in his 1953 remake of Judge Priest, The Sun Shines Bright; Fetchit, who reprised the part of Jeff in the latter film, thought that it was the main reason why the director had wanted to remake Judge Priest).

The social status of black folks seems little different in Judge Priest's late-century South than it was in antebellum times (at least as viewed by Hollywood films). Still, Jeff's characterisation by Maydew as a vagrant suggests that he is free to roam, which wouldn't have been the case before emancipation. We don't know how Jeff feels about having been "freed" unless we read an either cynical or innocently reconciliatory mindset in his suggestion that he might play both "Dixie" and "Marching Through Georgia" outside the courtroom during Gillis's trial.

"Darkies" are providers of music and songs, elements Ford could seldom do without in his movies. Jeff frequently plays harmonica and tambourine, and Aunt Dilsey, Priest's faithful maid and cook (played by the archetypal Hattie McDaniel)[4] is seen and heard singing in most of the scenes in which she appears, whether she belts out "My Old Kentucky Home" or improvises her own work song as she gathers the judge's shirts and trousers off the clothes line ("I got to take down the judge's clothes/Got to take them in the house/Yes Lord, got to get out that old ironin' board," etc.…)[5] At the end of the Ice Cream Festival she leads a quartet of young black women singing "Old Kentucky Home" ("This summer the darkies are gay") as Jeff hovers in the background, and Judge Priest joins the group with an off-key rendition of the song's closing bars. It transpires that Aunt Dilsey has somehow captured a chicken which she keeps hidden in her basket as she sings, allowing the other singers (including the judge!) to have a peek at it. Purloined fowls are definitely a major thematic thread of the movie.

Ford clearly felt comfortable with both Will Rogers the man and the characters he played in all three movies of the trilogy, especially perhaps Judge Priest (which the director cited at least a couple of times as his favorite film, or one of his favorites). Cobb, in the opening scroll, tells us that the character of Priest was inspired by a man "typical of the tolerance of that day and the wisdom of that almost vanished generation." Ford could easily have identified with such a description. Priest's low-key, homespun style brings to mind the feigned modesty of the three-time Oscar-winner introducing himself as "My name is John Ford. I make westerns." The judge's sympathy for blacks mirrors Ford's, as well as his sympathy for American Indians and all minorities.

As a result of the director's approach (Ford is the most Janus-like of filmakers), Judge Priest is really two almost different films, consisting of two contrasting sections. The first one, focused on the character of Priest, is leisurely, meandering, largely devoid of action. The later section, in which Priest almost vanishes into the background (Maydew has demanded that he be replaced by another judge, for impartiality's sake) is highly melodramatic, focussed on the Reverend Ashby Brand, whose very long speech during Gillis's trial details the defendant's heroic behavior during the war. The speech is illustrated by Griffith-flavored battle scenes, an inspiration made even more insistent by the casting of Henry B. Walthall (the male star of The Birth of a Nation [1915]) as Reverend Brand. Despite occasional comic relief (Maydew's oratory punctuated by a juror's skilful hits of the spittoon from a distance) the high tone is maintained until the triumphal ending that merges the film's two contrasting moods.

To the near-hysterical patriotism that suffuses the last third of Judge Priest, one may prefer the laid-back atmosphere of the earlier sequences, in which Priest is revealed to be not only a most unconventional judge and a cleverly folksy politician ("The first thing I learned in politics is when to say 'ain't'") but also a sensitive soul. His musings and reflections betray a sensitiveness that literally embraces all the senses, from the smell of honeysuckle to the sad sound of the whippoorwill's call to the taste of his beloved mint juleps (he cultivates a patch of mint for their preparation), to the beauty of the flowers in early spring, or of an old tintype of his long-deceased wife and their young children (he even comments on the quality of the enlargement).[6] Priest is also a very lonely man who misses his wife and talks to her photograph, then visits her grave in the churchyard to continue the conversation — a scene Ford loved so much that he recycled it for John Wayne's Captain Brittles fifteen years later in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

George Schneiderman, Ford's most frequent cinematographer in the 1920s and '30s going back to Just Pals (1920), shared with the director a sense of time and place and atmosphere that nicely comes through in the film's recent restoration. In a time when most filmmakers seemed to shun deep-focus photography as somehow old-fashioned, Ford and his DP manage to set up a striking shot that frames Priest in the foreground, sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, looking right, Jerome ("Rome," as everybody calls him) also in a chair, facing left in the middle ground, and in the far background, on the porch of the house next door, Ellie Mae, also sitting in a rocking chair, so that when Rome turns his head slightly to the right, he can see her from afar, the physical distance between them symbolizing the emotional distance she believes she has to keep.

Critic Martin Rubin seductively defined Judge Priest as "a guiltless paradise devoid of decay," but this is only a one-sided view, as guilt and decay are never very far from Ford's world, and the film, although not as somber as Doctor Bull (1933), does deal, like the earlier Ford-Rogers collaboration, with such assorted social ills as intolerance, prejudice and snobbery. Paradise always runs the risk of being lost or defiled and there are always at least two sides to the Fordian vision.

Jean-Pierre Coursodon
© FIPRESCI 2009

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