7/10
Oliver Hardy made a nice sidekick to John Wayne in The Fighting Kentuckian
2 August 2015
Back in the late '70s-early '80s, my local station of WBRZ-2 had aired the "John Wayne Theatre"-which showed many of his movies, primarily from Republic. This was one of the movies from that studio-Wayne's home for a great many years. When stumbling into this one on a Sunday afternoon, I was pleasantly surprised to see among the players one Oliver Hardy-a rare film he made without his usual teammate Stan Laurel. I taped this picture in the mid '90s off of American Movie Classics but didn't watch it until now. I'll just now say that Mr. Hardy is quite an amusingly pleasing presence doing some of his familiar mannerisms but also a little different from his "Ollie" character. The highlight may be a fiddler-playing sequence of which Hardy's Willie Payne can play but Wayne's character can't! There's more but I'll just say go ahead and watch The Fighting Kentuckian if the mood fits you! P.S. This version had wraparounds by host Nick Clooney-George's father. In the beginning one, he mentions leading lady Vera Ralston had given Hardy a gift of a deck chair-specially made to fit his girth! In the one after the movie, he erroneously mentions this was Ollie's final film-his actual very last one was Atoll K (Utopia in the U.S.), once more with Stan Laurel. Oh, and since one of the locations of The Bluegrass State mentioned in the movie was Lexington, I have to mention that my family had briefly lived there in '74-'75 and my youngest sister and sibling was born there.
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