Henry King's State Fair (1933)

Henry King, director of State Fair, and star Will Rogers are little remembered today, though Rogers was one of the top box-office draws in the early 30’s (he died in a plane crash in 1935) and King made movies from 1916 to 1962.  King’s State Fair was eclipsed by two musical versions that followed later (1945 and 1962) and even Rogers’s best films (Steamboat ‘Round the Bend, Judge Priest, Dr. Bull; all directed by John Ford) are considered marred by the presence of Stepin Fetchit, whose complex trickster character has only begun to be appreciated by scholars (the public is far behind).

State Fair is a detailed character study of a farming family, with its pickles and prize pig, at the state fair, where the older children find love and lose it and Mom and Dad win blue ribbons.  Hal Mohr’s cinematography matches studio and location work quite nicely.  The children (Janet Gaynor and Norman Foster) want to stay loyal to their parents (Will Rogers and Louise Dresser) and their rural world but also long to leave and spread their wings with lovers they meet at the fair, the love affairs being relatively explicit in this era before the production code clamped down on such details.  This was a time when Americans were leaving farms for jobs in the cities and the kids hear the siren call of the city while the older generation raises better pigs and improves their recipes and directors such as King began to move away from such charming and folksy stories of rural live to costume and period films.