Farmer’s Daughter, The (1940) (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 17, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
James P. HoganRelease Date(s)
1940 (August 12, 2025)Studio(s)
Paramount Pictures (Kino Lorber Studio Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Unrelated to the 1947 film of the same name, released to Blu-ray in 2018, this 1940 film also called The Farmer’s Daughter is a sprightly little B-movie from Paramount, the last film of star Martha Raye’s long-term contract. There she supported bigger male Paramount stars, particularly Bob Hope, with Raye not quite a big enough name to headline an A-feature on her own. Running just over one hour, The Farmer’s Daughter fit her status at the time: for a B-movie it’s comparatively lavish, with several A-level character stars in supporting parts, it has a large cast and a couple of musical numbers, and better production values than most Bs, though it cuts corners in other ways, including one weird use of stock footage. Though profoundly predictable—if you can’t guess how it’ll all end after the first five minutes, you’re not paying attention—both the movie and Raye herself exhibit a lot of agreeable, eager-to-please energy.
A Broadway angel is willing to back producer Nickie North’s (Charlie Ruggles) latest show, provided that he cast demanding prima donna Clarice Sheldon (Gertrude Michael) in the lead and open it on the straw hat circuit, far from New York. Nickie, accompanied by juvenile lead actor Dennis Crane (Richard Denning) and press agent Scoop Trimble (William Frawley), soon locate an ideal farm with a barn big enough to seat 800 people, owned by agreeable Tom Bingham (William Duncan).
Patience (Raye), the farmer’s daughter, falls for Dennis, he attracted to her despite her reputation as a first-class klutz. The company arrives, anxious to put together a hit show, but Clarice lives up to her reputation, making all kinds of outrageous demands, treating everyone like lowly servants, and constantly threatening to walk. Out of spite, after observing the burgeoning romance between Dennis and Patience, Clarice tries to put the kibosh on that, too.
The screenplay, by future director Lewis R. Foster from better future director Delmer Daves, keeps things moving at a fast clip; in nearly every scene an attempt is made to find humor in the situation and characters, and there’s a lot of physical comedy, too. Director James P. Hogan, typical of journeymen directors of the time, worked in every conceivable genre, and was no comedy specialist, he primarily associated with mysteries and Westerns, but to his credit he doesn’t gum up the works, either.
Though somewhat atypical of a lower-berth Paramount title, it’s interesting to see how effective this is for a “little” movie carried mostly by its appealing cast. Patience’s sweet awkwardness plays right into Martha Raye’s talents; she’s accident-prone but good-natured, hardly glamorous in the usual Hollywood sense but girl-next-doorsy and likable. Raye gets to sing a couple of songs, including—hardly a surprise—when she becomes a last-minute replacement for temperamental Clarice.
The production keeps costs down using stock music for the underscoring, for one thing. Even during the montage of Patience playing the lead in Nickie’s musical, one short clip of her performing appears to be stock footage from an earlier Raye film.
Charlie Ruggles, best remembered today as the narrator of the witty ‘60s Aesop’s Fables cartoons, was a big character star of the 1930s, with future My Three Sons actors William Frawley and William Demarest (as an actor in the show) also long-established. (This was their only film together.) Future sci-fi genre star and Hawaii Governor (on Hawaii Five-O) Richard Denning was a utility leading man of scads of low-budget films, but he was a far better actor than most. Just three years (though 37 films!) into his movie career, he already looks comfortable on-camera.
Other welcome faces include Jack Norton as the—naturally—drunk playwright; Tom Dugan as a harried stage manager, Sheila Ryan as a chorine, Darryl Hickman as Patience’s buttermilk-selling kid brother, PRC starlet Wanda McKay as a cashier, Janet Waldo as a switchboard operator, and so on. If you know your classic movie actors, this is a fun one.
Although never particularly a fan of Martha’s Raye’s unsubtle physical comedy, I watched The Farmer’s Daughter with a kind of admiration for her indefatigability. Her energetic screen persona remained intact and unchanged for decades, in good and bad movies (including, in the former category, Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux), entertaining the troops through several wars, starring in one of the Broadway incarnations of Hello, Dolly!, and later in a Sid & Marty Krofft kid’s show.
In later years she must have been pretty embarrassed doing schtick in The Concorde... Airport ’79 (her character apparently suffering chronic diarrhea and having toilet water splashed all over her) and later becoming a longtime pitchwoman for a denture cleaner product. Yet, even in those alarming assignments, Raye gave her all.
Kino-Lorber’s Blu-ray of The Farmer’s Daughter, in its original 1.37:1 full-frame and black-and-white, is an excellent encoding, sharp with good blacks and contrast. The DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono is also above average, and supported by optional English subtitles. The disc itself is Region “A” encoded.
The lone supplement is an informative new audio commentary track by Farran Smith Nehme.
While Warner Archive has released scads of B-movies from Warner Bros., RKO, and MGM (who insisted they didn’t make mere “B” pictures, but really did) while Fox and Universal have issued many of theirs to DVD, Paramount’s B-pictures are less familiar. But The Farmer’s Daughter serves its purpose well: it’s a compact, entertaining little movie.
- Stuart Galbraith IV