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Earthworm Tractors
A Natural Born Salesman
USA 1936
produced by Samuel Bischoff for First National/Warner Brothers
directed by Ray Enright
starring Joe E.Brown, June Travis, Guy Kibbee, Dick Foran, Carol Hughes, Gene Lockhart, Olin Howard, Joseph Crehan, Charles C.Wilson, William B.Davidson, Irving Bacon, Stuart Holmes, Rosalind Marquis, Harry Depp
screenplay by Hugh Cummings, Richard Macaulay, Joe Traub, based on stories by William Hazlett Upson, music by Howard Jackson, Heinz Roemheld
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Available on DVD! To buy, click on link(s) below and help keep this site afloat (commissions earned) |
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Alexander Botts (Joe E.Brown) considers himself to be a natural born
salesman ... unfortunately the nice little novelties he sells are too
small for his sweetheart Sally (Carol Hughes) to marry him, so he decides
to go into the tractor business, and gets himself a job with the company Earthworm
Tractors ... but from hereon, everything seems to go wrong: first he
puts expenses without end on the company account, then he demonstrates the
advantages of the Earthworm Tractors to the wrong man, Johnson (Guy
Kibbee), then he even runs his tractor over the car of a prospected buyer
(William B.Davidson) ... but somehow he seems to come out on top, and even
Johnson's daughter Mabel (June Travis) falls for him.
But she wants to persuade Botts to sell tractors to her daddy - a rich
businessman in lumbering - at any price, and the methods Botts uses to
demonstrate the advantages of his tractor to Johnson after all are at best
questionable: First he drags Johnson's house through all the city, then he
even kidnaps Johnson in the tractor and drives him through a minefield ...
which at the end does the trick, and Johnson gets tractors after all, and
Botts gets Mabel after Sally has dumped him anyways ...
One one hand, Earthworm Tractors is of course one of these cute but
pointless 1930's comedies, and even Joe E.Brown's performance as
loud-mouthed fast-talking salesman grows stale after a while. What makes
this film special though is its many scenes of utter destruction, with the
tractor running pretty much over everything, including a few cars and
explosions. All of these scenes are done for real though, no model work
included ... which makes this film just beautiful !!!
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