From my favorite movies..

Absolutely the worst movie.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

What the hell is Will Rogers doing in this movie.Will Rogers and all these old Gezzers shouting about Dixie.The Fox Studio must have been desperate to make a crappy movie about a man accused of some wrong doing and being exonerated for being brave in a confederate Battle,I thought the South lost the war. because you would never know.Total crap. Whats heroic about the keeping of slaves?? This is the same inhumanness that kept people in bondage and your trying to portray the Confederate Army as Heroic. total crap.This was an excuse to portray the South as Heroic. I am embarrassed to watch this stupid movie and explain to some young people about what the civil war was about, and more disgraceful they used poor Negroes to play Dixie songs outside the courthouse.and then parade them through town. what a total disgrace. there was nothing funny about slavery,there is nothing funny about War.Insulting to Americans and all free peoples.

Will Rogers did three films with director John Ford who probably knew best how to utilize Will Rogers folksy charm and personality on the screen. Judge Priest is the best of the three films Rogers did with Ford. The film is based on a character created by Rogers fellow American humorist Irvin S. Cobb.Cobb's Judge Priest stories are based on characters created from his childhood in Paducah, Kentucky. Priest is a man very much like Will Rogers in real life, full of homespun wisdom and common sense. The casting is almost perfect, I can't think of anyone else who could have done the role better.The film is an amalgam of several of those stories the main plot line being the assault of Frank Melton by town misanthrope David Landau. The case would normally come before Will Rogers, but he's forced to recuse himself because it's the first case of Tom Brown who is the nephew of Rogers. Brown is back home now, a newly minted lawyer and he's involved with a girl from the wrong side of the tracks, Anita Louise. There's a connection between his personal and professional life that Brown little suspects.Cobb's childhood Kentucky is an idyllic place where even the newly freed black people are contented in their second class status. The racist overtone of Judge Priest is unmistakable and why the film is criticized today. However Irvin S. Cobb was painting an accurate picture of the servile blacks, servile because they had to be. But the Stepin Fetchit character goes way over the top.Judge Priest was later remade by Ford in the Fifties as The Sun Shines Bright and though the more obvious racial stereotyping got cleaned up somewhat, it could never be eliminated from the film.But the film because of the presence of Will Rogers gets a high rating from me. It's a chance to see one America's wittiest and wisest men at his homespun best and that opportunity should not be passed up.

I love old movies and was looking forward to seeing my first Will Rogers movie. However, this film is an embarrassment with decent actors struggling to overcome a corn-pone plot. The only reason to watch this creaking antique is to catch a glimpse of Hattie McDaniel and Stepin Fetchit who provide the "comic" relief. As Ms. McDaniel said, better to play the maid than to be one. She and Will Rogers were apparently actually good friends in real life, something which makes the movie's depiction of the happy, ignorant, thieving "darkies" doubly painful.The plot is archaic not just because it depicts former slaves happily singing "My Old Kentucky Home" as they steal the white folks's food. It is based on a story that celebrates the Confederacy and its soldiers, with Will Rogers as a former soldier (now a judge). It ends with a triumphant march through town of the Confederate veterans on Memorial Day. Although Rogers mentions in passing that he's saved Stepin Fetchit from a lynching at some point, it's done as a humorous throw away line. I really think movies like this should be seen more often: they are an excellent reminder of the world as it was not so long ago and how grateful we should be that it has passed away.

In a sleepy small town in Kentucky during the 1890s, an idiosyncratic judge (the Priest of the title, played by Will Rogers, in one of his last roles) defends the innocence of a taciturn man accused of assailing other town folk, by proving that he was a hero of the Confederacy during the Civil War. If you forget the blatant, unthinking racism of the movie (by the end, you have the dimwitted blacks of the town playing Dixie) and its saccharine sentimentality, this film is a good portrayal of the mores and traditions of the Scotch-Irish (or, if you prefer, the rednecks) that forms the backbone of America's personal character. Also, this movie also shows why Stepin Fetchit was such a controversial performer. Recommended with reservations.