Steamboat Round the Bend (1935)

My Review

“Steamboat Round the Bend” is comedy B-film starring Will Rogers as a steamboat captain who enters his boat in a winner-take-all race on the Mississippi River. Director John Ford ably took the helm of this movie and kept things smooth sailing in the 82 minute running time.

The passable screenplay by Ben Lucien Burman, Dudley Nichols, and Lamar Trotti provided adequate dialogue for comedian Rogers and co-stars Anne Shirley, Eugene Pallette, John McGuire, Francis Ford, Roger Imhof, Stepin Fetchit, and Irving S. Cobb. The watchable “Steamboat Round the Bend” was the sixth highest grossing film of 1935 for Fox Film Corporation and 20th Century Fox, newly formed from the merger of Fox Films and 20th Century Studios on May 31, 1935. It was released in September, 1935.

“Steamboat Round the Bend” was Will Rogers’ final film, released three weeks after his death in an airplane crash on Aug. 15, 1935.