John Ford's Judge Priest 1934

Healing America's intolerance is one of the major themes of Ford's [Will] Rogers trilogy.
---Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press, 1999)

Judge Priest today has not aged; a storyland of myth and symbol, it looks just as fresh and old-fashioned as it did fifty years ago.
---Tag Gallagher, John Ford:  The Man and His Films (U. of California Press, 1986).

I don't write enough about John Ford, a particular favorite of mine who produced an impressive body of work. Turner Classic movies recently showed Judge Priest in a series of films devoted to Anita Louise, who has a minor but significant role in the film.  Judge Priest has seldom been shown on commercial television because Stepin Fetchit has an important part, a part that was sometimes cut out when the film was shown on TV, so that the movie made no sense.  I've talked about Fetchit before, how his character outwitted white people by pretending to be ignorant and shiftless.  To quote V.S. Naipaul, who adored Fetchit when he was a child in Trinidad, "the sight of Stepin Fetchit with white people was like a dream of a happier world."  Certainly one of the loveliest images in Ford's film is Will Rogers and Stepin Fetchit walking down the road together on their way to the fishing hole.

Judge Priest was one of three films Rogers made with John Ford; Dr. Bull (1933) and Steamboat Round the Bend  (1935) were the other two.  The film, based on stories by Irvin S. Cobb, takes place in Kentucky in 1890, where the Civil War is still fresh in many minds.  The folksy Rogers plays a judge who helps to acquit a man accused of assault by evoking his bravery in The War Between the States, even having Stepin Fetchit play Dixie on the harmonica outside the courtroom window during some important testimony. The African-Americans in the film -- including Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel -- are treated with dignity; they may technically servants but they are very much in charge.  John Ford's indebtedness to D.W. Griffith in Judge Priest is clear in many ways; not only was Ford one of the klansmen in Griffith's Birth of the Nation but the major witness at the trial in Judge Priest, Rev. Ashby Brand, is played by Henry B. Walthall, one of the stars of Griffith's 1916 film.  And Ford's re-creation of a Civil War battle during Brand's testimony is a clear tribute to Griffith.