Doctor Bull is one of the less-often-shown
of the films that John Ford made at Fox,
from the first half of the 1930s and was adapted from The Last Adam,
a novel by James Gould Cozzens.
The plot, concerning small-town life and morality and a man's running
afoul of the latter, could hold up well, especially as the man in question
is played by Will Rogers, who certainly knew how to win an audience over.
The problem lies in Ford's direction, which seems to be a throwback
to the silent era in terms of emoting and nuances on the part of the cast,
coupled with the relative lack of camera movement typical of the early sound era
(and the silent era circa the teens).
The primitive acting styles and directorial technique make
for a surprisingly slow-going 90 minutes for modern viewers,
even making allowances for the movie's age and giving Ford a
ll manner of benefits of the doubt.
User Review
QuoteDisplay More2 August 2002 | by Kalaman (Ottawa)
"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."