Judge William Pittman Priest (Will Rogers) is an avuncular Judge who has served for 25 years on the Bench in rural Kentucky. When his nephew comes back home from law school (he has been educated in the North, presumably at Harvard), the young man seeks the Judge's advice. The Judge aids the young lawyer in successfully wooing a neighbor girl who seems to have no father. In fact, the girl's father was once a convict on a chain-gang in Virginia, but was paroled to fight as a soldier in an artillery company. The man has come to the small town to be near his daughter who doesn't know of his existence; her mother died giving birth to her. When a local yokel insults the former soldier's daughter, the man punches the blackguard in the nose. The scoundrel with a couple of goons attacks the man in a tavern and there's a fight in which the villain's razor (he's a barber) is used to "cut up" the bad guy. The girl's father is charged with criminal assault and the young man, "Rome" Priest defends the former artillery soldier. The local minister was the commander of the artillery battery in which the ex-convict served. He is persuaded to testify in Court as to what he knows about the soldier -- he's called by Judge Priest, who has had to recuse himself from the Bench -- as a character witness for the former Confederate soldier. He is acquitted, albeit on obviously specious grounds -- the local men are unable to convict a former Confederate soldier who served with distinction in the late War to preserve the Confederacy, as they call the conflict. The film ends with a memorial day march which is really a celebration of the Lost Cause and the nobility of the Confederacy. The prosecuting attorney, who is a silver-tongued but bombastic local politician, plans to run against Judge Priest for the position of Circuit Court Judge. Judge Priest's role in winning an acquittal for the former convict and artillery-man, presumably, makes secure his hold on the office. All of this is shown to take place in rural Kentucky in 1890.
This plot, although questionable in many respects, isn't the problem with the movie. The film runs aground (at least to modern eyes) on its treatment of its Black characters. The picture begins with the silver-tongued orator prosecuting Jeff Poindexter, played by Stepin Fetchit -- Jeff is sound asleep while he is being tried. When he is roused to hear a little of the case against him (he is supposed to have stolen a chicken), he testifies on his own behalf and gets tangled up in a story about catching fish with "beef liver" bait on the nearby Sleepy River. The gentlemen of the Jury, who are all former Confederate soldiers, are dim-witted countrified types and the trial degenerates into a windy debate about whether there are in fact big catfish in the Sleepy River. We don't see the outcome of the trial. Rather, the movie just cuts from the Trial to the Judge and Jeff walking to the river with their fishing rods -- they intend to try out the "beef liver" bait that Jeff has suggested. At the climax of the film, during the trial of the heroine's ex-convict father, Judge Priest contrives a spectacle of son et lumiere -- the Reverend testifies as to the ex-convict's heroism to a patriotic soundtrack. This soundtrack is Jeff playing a bass drum and harmonica outside of the Courthouse windows -- he is supposed to play "Dixie" and, gradually, as he performs, more and more African Americans with banjos and other instruments join in the song. When the jury acquits the ex-convict, everyone floods outdoors and marches down the dusty main street of the little town, the African-Americans following along and serenading the marching former Confederates, now all old men with long white beards, with the song "Dixie". By a weird, almost dreamlike slippage of logic, the Civil War becomes a conflict that has the effect of freeing enslaved White men -- that is, the members of the chain-gang who volunteer for service with their ankles still fettered together by iron manacles. When the men agree to fight for the Confederacy, we see the manacles broken and, then, there is a montage of battle scenes showing their heroic service. All of this is intercut with images of ragged and stereotypical Black loiterers and loafers playing "Dixie" outside the Courthouse to illustrate, as if with a film soundtrack, the Reverend's character witness testimony as to the heroine's father. It's got chutzpah that's for sure -- the Civil War freed enslaved Whites who, then, march triumphantly through the streets of their village, capering to the music played by former slaves performing "Dixie". The casting simply pours salt into the open wound that is this film -- the Reverend who testifies to save the ex-convict in the Trial is played Henry B. Walthall, the man who played the heroic "little colonel" in Griffith's Birth of a Nation eighteen years earlier. Stepin Fetchit's performance is shocking. He speaks in a high-pitched whine that is painful to the ears -- in fact, intolerable. When we first see him, he rises slowly from where he has been sleeping, reaching up with his right hand to scratch the left side of his head behind his ear -- it's simian gesture that is very disturbing. At one point, Fetchit's character, Jeff, gets confused and tells the Judge that he may forget to play "Dixie" and instead perform "Marching Through Georgia" outside the Courthouse window. (Of course, the sons of the South despise Henry Clay Work's "Marching Through Georga" which celebrates Sherman's March to the Sea in which Atlanta was burned -- later to be the subject of Gone with the Wind.) Judge Priest is angry at Jeff and says that if he plays "Marching Through Georgia" there will be trouble: "I saved you from one lynching," the Judge says. "But if you play that song, I'll lynch you myself." None of this defensible.
The tragedy arises from the fact that the movie has many beautiful set pieces. Scenes in which the lonely widower, Judge Priest laments in stoic fashion the loss of his wife and family (his children seem to have died in the same epidemic that killed his wife) are genuinely affecting, even moving. Scenes of courtship between the young lovers under the warm southern skies are beautifully shot and the rituals of the small community -- including an ice-cream social hosted by the Daughters of the Confederacy -- are lovingly filmed. (A group of Black church ladies provides the musical accompaniment for the ice cream social, singing in very tight, beautifully controlled four-part harmony, a bit like an old Barbershop quartet.). Hattie McDaniel sings some Blues tunes including a lovely call-and-response number in which Will Rogers performs as a duet with her. The film is fairly primitive -- it's big scenes are talky and theatrical and filmed with static camera. There are very few close-ups in the movie, just a couple of shots of the young lovers. The camera never moves. The Judge and Jeff are always filmed in middle distance. (This is necessary in part because Stepin Fetchit has complete dead-looking, even murderous, eyes -- seen in close-shot, he's frightening.) The sets look authentic and there's lots of magnolias and moonlight in the studio shots that are supposed to depict the graveyard and the church social in the warm, fragrant night. (Rogers says he loves the smell of the honeysuckle.) John Ford is able to wrest a great deal of sentiment out of this material and it's never really maudlin. Furthermore, there is one shot in which the premise of the movie is questioned: while the Reverend is waxing eloquent on the Lost Cause and the ex-convict's heroism, the camera shows the Judge -- for an instant, he rolls his eyes in dismay at the oratory. But the film passes by this instant as if it didn't exist.
Judge Priest was a big box-office hit. John Ford sometimes referred to this movie as his favorite of the films that he directed. It's utterly fascinating and appalling.
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