Swing Your Lady (1938)

Storyline

Promoter Ed Hatch (Humphrey Bogart) comes to the Ozarks with his slow-witted wrestler Joe Skopapoulos whom he pits against a hillbilly Amazon blacksmith, Sadie Horn. Joe falls in love with her and won't fight. At least not until Sadie's beau Noah shows up. 

Synopsis

Wrestler Joe Skopapolous, together with his manager, Ed, and his trainers, Popeye and Shiner, arrives in a small town in the Ozarks hoping to promote a wrestling match. Things look hopeless because there is no local candidate for Joe's opponent until Ed meets the blacksmith, a woman named Sadie. Believing it would be a good gimmick for Joe to wrestle with Sadie, Ed offers her $100 to compete. She readily agrees because she needs the money to buy a suite of bedroom furniture. Unfortunately for Ed's plans, Joe meets Sadie on a training run and falls madly in love with the large woman. When Joe learns that Sadie is his opponent, he refuses to fight her even though she begs him. Things look bleak until Ed learns that Sadie has been courted by Noah, a huge mountain man. Ed sets up a match between the two rivals, and for promotion, tells everyone that Sadie will marry the winner. Sadie favors Joe, which does not suit Ed. He shows her a picture of a woman and her children and leads her to believe that they belong to Joe. Furious, she announces that she is going back to Noah, and Ed has to convince Joe to lose the fight. Joe reluctantly agrees, but midway through the contest, Ed learns that Madison Square Garden wants to present the winner, so he signals to Joe, who rapidly overcomes his opponent. Joe marries Sadie and gives up the ring for the blacksmith shop.

Cast & Crew

Ray Enright Director
Humphrey Bogart as Ed
Frank McHugh as Popeye
Louise Fazenda as Sadie
Nat Pendleton as Joe Skopapolous
Penny Singleton as Cookie
Allen Jenkins as Shiner
Leon Weaver as Waldo
Frank Weaver as Ollie Davis
Elviry Weaver as Mrs. Davis
Ronald Reagan as Jack Miller
Daniel Boone Savage as Noah

Release Date 8 Jan 1938
Color/BW Black and White
Sound Mono
Production Dates mid-Sep--mid-Nov 1937
Duration (in mins) 72 or 79
Duration (in reels) 9
Premiere Information Dallas, TX premiere: Jan 1938
Hannibal, MO premiere: Feb 1938.
Distribution Company Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.
Production Company Warner Bros. Pictures, Inc.
Country United States

REVIEWS
:
Summary of NY TIMES  review

This musical comedy is based on a modestly successful Broadway play and stars Humphrey Bogart as wrestling promoter Ed Hatch. Ed is in Kentucky with his dopey, muscle-bound client Joe "The Wrestling Hercules" Skopapoulous (Nat Pendleton). The two are further accompanied by Ed's assistant Shiner (Allen Jenkins), his girlfriend Cookie (Penny Singleton) and Joe's trainer Popeye Bronson (Frank McHugh). Unfortunately, the entourage has not had a decent gig since they entered Kentucky and end up stranded and broke on a lonely country rode. Fortunately, a hefty farm girl, who calls herself Sadie Horn, happens along and using her incredible strength, gets the travelers back on the road. Ed is impressed and suddenly inspired to hire the brawny lass as his newest grappler and stage fights between she and Joe. Future president Ronald Reagan has a small role as a sportscaster. Songs include: "Mountain Swingeroo," "Hillbilly from Tenth Avenue" and "Dig Me a Grave in Old Missouri."

VIEWER REVIEWS:

Goofy, yes. Lowbrow, yes. Funny, absolutely!, 2 January 2006
Author: David Spalding from www.Korova.com
Sometimes actors are displeased with films for purely personal reasons. Harrison Ford positively hates Blade Runner (1982). Bogart disliked this one for his own reasons. But consider how few comedy films Bogart was cast in. His talent there was ignored in favor of the money-reaping tough guy roles, but his performance here is just cracking. Nat Pendleton (usually cast as the lunkhead tough guy cop) gets a deserved near-star turn as the lovesick wrestler with a childlike innocence. Penny Singleton (sometimes billed as Dorothy McNulty) gets to show a variety of talents that she only got to hint at in After The Thin Man (1936). With comedy, musical numbers, and character roles galore, this film is a great treat. 

Bogey in the Ozarks, 9 September 2005
Author: bkoganbing from Buffalo, New York
Wrestling manager Humphrey Bogart is stranded with his wrestler, Nat Pendleton, and the rest of the entourage, Frank McHugh and Allen Jenkins in some Hooterville like town in the Ozarks. The boys are down and out and Bogey wants to scare up a match for some traveling money.
He meets up with Amazonian blacksmith Louise Fazenda and arranges a match, but Pendleton and Fazenda fall in love and that plan goes awry. Not to worry because Fazenda has some gargantuan guy who's been a-courtin' her and he's out of joint. So the match is Pendleton and Daniel Boone Savage.
Bogart said it to all who'd listen that he thought this was his worst feature film. I can certainly see why he thought so. He really looks so uncomfortable even in a set supposed to resemble hillbilly heaven.
My guess is that the Warner Brothers were trying to get to a different audience. They were known as the urban studio in the Thirties and concentrated on a product geared to that audience. Other than Dick Foran B westerns a whole market was being untapped.
I'm sure this must have been offered to Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney before Bogey. He wasn't a big star then so this kind of material could be fluffed off on him.
So we've got Sam Spade in Hooterville along with a lot of hillbilly music and even a brief role by the 40th President of the United States as a reporter.
For die hard Bogey fans only. 

Monday, 5 January 2009
Swing Your Lady (1938) Ray Enright
Posted by Hal C F Astell

Humphrey Bogart looks chipper when he bounces out of the car and into the hotel in Mussel City, MO. Frank McHugh, Allen Jenkins and Nat Pendleton don't look too happy though, following on behind, and Bogie was hiding plenty. He saw this as the worst film he ever made, which it isn't (watch The Return of Doctor X for something notably worse), but it's the least Bogart of all the Bogart films I've seen, and I'm most of the way through them. It may not be a casting disaster on the scale of John Wayne as Genghis Khan or Kate Hepburn as Mary, Queen of Scots but it's certainly not one of the department's proudest moments. While the role of Ed Hatch really should have been played by someone like Lee Tracy, there's a far better candidate than Bogart in the same film: Frank McHugh would have done a much better job.

I'm pretty sure Bogie knew that too and was cursing every line he had to say. It wouldn't surprise me if they put an extra camera behind him so that if he hated it too much they could show the other view instead and forget about take 27. Lines like 'Joe Skopopolous, the ponderous pachyderm of grunt and groan, the Wrestling Hercules, is the next heavyweight champion of the world,' are bad enough, but the ultimate embarrassing Bogart moment of all time is when he gets pinned to the ground by Louise Fazenda who won't let him up until he says, 'Hootie Owl'. He probably spent the rest of his life clocking anyone who muttered those words in his presence.

Anyway, Ed Hatch is a promoter and Joe 'Hercules' Skopapoulos is the wrestler he's promoting throughout the little towns of Missouri. He ends up looking for an opponent in Plunkett City, population 749, most of whom seem to be sat on the porch outside the hardware store playing hillbilly music. And this is hillbilly music like you haven't seen on film before. It's so down home they don't even have duelling banjos, they have duelling saw players, along with every other strange instrument you can think of that could remotely join in a hillbilly song without it sounding like it should be on the Dr Demento show. Then again, with the unique instruments, fiddlers fiddling their beards and songs like Hillbilly from 10th Avenue, maybe they should.

Of course the opponent he finds isn't quite the opponent he expects. This one's a blacksmith, but she's also a girl called Sadie Horn. He discovers her by accident when his car gets stuck in a mudhole and she lifts it out without any help and realises he's been gifted with a spectacle. While he hides the choice of opponent from Joe, because he's a dumb cluck who can't understand words when they're spelled out aloud and he's liable to do something stupid, Joe has already met Sadie and he's already fallen for her too, one night when he takes refuge from the rain inside her blacksmith's forge.

She's a big girl, admittedly, one played by veteran actress Louise Fazenda, and she steals the whole show here. She had a habit of doing that, as far back as 1913 when she was playing in slapstick comedies, one reel westerns and even things like Poor Jake's Demise with Lon Chaney, which I'm going to have to search out now that it's no longer lost. Watching her be the prize in a wrestling match between Nat Pendleton in full on dumb mode and a wild hillbilly played by Daniel Boone Savage may seem like a bizarre situation to us, but probably not to her given her long and varied career. She has a ball with the hillbilly dialect, throwing out epithets like 'well, shuck my corn', 'chisel my tombstone' and 'I'll snatch you bald headed' seemingly at least twice per line of dialogue.

Make no mistake, this is not a good film. It's a cheap piece of exploitation garbage aimed firmly at the hillbilly market, based on a play (featuring Frank McHugh's brother, among others) but with breaks for old time country good time songs and associated shenanigans, and a guest spot as Ed Hatch's dumb girlfriend for Penny Singleton, who is fine really in her singing and dancing though she's as out of place in this film as Bogie is. It's a jigsaw box with a collection of jigsaw pieces from different jigsaws with different pictures on them, and no matter how you work it the pieces aren't going to fit with each other. This even continued to the screening: who could have honestly thought this would work as the other half of a double bill with Boris Karloff's The Invisible Menace?

What saves it from being completely worthless is the fact that it has an enviable cast who know it's nonsense, and with the exception of Bogart, have fun with it. Fazenda is wonderful, but Frank McHugh is fun too. Allen Jenkins doesn't have enough to do. Nat Pendleton played every level of dumb in his long career, but this one went a little too over the top. He does get to show his wrestling chops, which are admirable but hardly surprising since he was an Olympic silver medal winner. Penny Singleton is still annoying but a little less so than she was last time I saw this film in 2005. It made enough of an impact on me then as a unique bit of film that I wrote about it here: http://www.dawtrina.com/personal/film/reviews/swing.html. This time out it still has impact, admittedly for all the wrong reasons, so I wrote about it again.