Dr. Bull

"Doctor Bull" is Ford's first of three collaborations with Will Rogers. Much like their later pictures, it combines humor and drama with greater emphasis on dialogue and performance rather than narrative. Mr. Ford admired Rogers' folksy charm and found in him a figure whose moral wisdom perfectly matched with his own. In these leisurely and unpretentious pictures, Rogers is successfully a healer and reconciler, but, like most of Ford's subsequent protagonists, he is also a melancholy and lonely figure.

Though it is nowhere near the charm, subtlety and enduring greatness of "Judge Priest"(1934) & "Steamboat 'Round the Bend"(1935), "Doctor Bull" is nonetheless worth seeing for Mr. Rogers' loving portrayal of a small-town Connecticut doctor combating typhus and narrow-mindedness.

It is interesting to note that in the same year Rogers starred in another whiff of Americana - Henry King's lovely and often underrated "State Fair."