ArkansasArkansaw by Blevins Brooks;

Author:Blevins, Brooks; [Blevins, Brooks]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: 2012-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

It is the latter film that best represents the romantic, even sentimental, side of the Arkansaw image. In The Arkansas Traveler Burns plays a nameless “hobo ex machina” who arrives in a small town and within a matter of days saves the struggling newspaper, starts a radio station, plays matchmaker between two attractive youngsters from rival families, and brings the town’s most dastardly citizen to justice. If not great theater, it was nonetheless “pleasant homespun comedy” devoid of the baser stereotyping found in most hillbilly stage presentations and many big-screen comedies. Arkansas’s official reaction to The Arkansas Traveler suggested no sore feelings. The film’s world premiere in Little Rock attracted a standingroom-only crowd of eleven hundred to the Pulaski Theater on 6 October 1938, even without the picture’s star in attendance. In declaring “Arkansas Traveler Day,” Little Rock’s mayor lauded Burns as “one of [Arkansas’s] most outstanding native sons” and his movie as “a project that will bring credit and favorable comment to the state.” The Arkansas Gazette praised the movie as “one of the few, and perhaps the first, which casts no ridicule on Burns’ home state.”81

But in true Arkansaw fashion, Burns’s films reflected a wider range of imagery. In Radio City Revels (1938), he plays an inept Arkansas hillbilly who tramps to New York City to pursue a songwriting career but whose musical muse comes to visit only in his dreams. And Burns would end his movie career with the unfortunate Comin’ Round the Mountain, a story of a hillbilly musician who returns home to Monotony, Tennessee, after striking out in the big city. Carrying the tagline “Hillbilly Howler of the Year,” it was Burns’s most exploitative film. Likely still stinging from criticism for Comin’ Round the Mountain, the “Arkansas Philosopher” surprised everyone when he refused to honor his contract for a proposed movie titled “Joan of Arkansas” due to its “disgusting” script that impugned Burns’s fellow Arkansawyers. “All they know at the studio about Arkansas is what they see in the cartoons of a magazine that sells for 50 cents,” Burns quipped.82

Burns’s sudden shift to defender of his home state may have caught some people off guard, but only because his comedy was frequently viewed as more pandering to an urbane crowd than it actually was. But the fact that someone would take on Arkansas’s detractors was nothing new by 1941. In the first half of the twentieth century, especially, the defenders of the Wonder State were just as vocal as the anti-Arkansas pundits and producers they challenged. As our survey has shown thus far, it would seem that the romantically positive, or at least innocuous, interpretations of Arkansas were as numerous as the more negative portrayals, and probably more so. Defensive Arkansans honed in on the negative imagery, however, and through their vociferous attacks—and the gleeful counterattacks these prompted—managed to saddle the state with a dual opprobrium as not only a hillbilly state, but a hillbilly state with no sense of humor.

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