State Fair (1933)
Introducing the talents of Blue Boy, the prize hog
A State Fair is like Life—begins lustily—offers everything—whether you go for sheep and blue ribbons—or shape and blue eyes. And, too soon, it's all over!
State Fair (1933) - watched 11/13/24
Director: Henry King
Writers: Sonya Levien, Paul Green
Starring: Janet Gaynor, Will Rogers, Lew Ayers, Sally Eilers, Norman Foster, Louise Dressler
Available to watch on most platforms, to buy or rent
First Time Watch? Yes
Well, it’s a new year, we’re in the thick of the 2024/2025 awards season, authoritarianism is alive and well, and for the past two weeks my city has been on fire.
It feels like we’ve taken the peak pandemic years, upped the intensity by a thousand, and condensed it into a few weeks. I’ve been glued to my phone (yes, more so than usual), checking wildfire alerts and wrestling with whether or not we should pack up the car and evacuate. I’m taking inventory of everything that I own, deciding what’s irreplaceable and what I would be okay with losing. I’m hearing about friends who have to evacuate, colleagues and acquaintances who have no homes to go back to, people who have lost their lives either because they couldn’t leave in time or they tried to save their homes. I get a loud alert to my phone, then another one moments later letting me know that the first one was a false alarm. Then another false alarm at four in the morning. People on the news in tears. Traumatized, confused pets covered in ash and shivering in cages. I can’t explain to my own needy dog why we can’t go on long walks right now due to the poor air quality. The air quality index, by the way, isn’t always accurate or all-encompassing of the myriad of toxins floating in the air. Did you know that? I didn’t! So make sure you wear a mask outside, and make sure it’s the right kind of mask, even though the sky is the clearest blue you’ve seen in a long time. How could an impure sky still look so blue?
The community comes together and lifts each other up. We donate our money, our time, the clothes in our closet, the food in our pantry. We ping pong between big box stores and donation centers. It’s a beautiful thing, until it’s not. Because don’t donate to those people, they’re not a legitimate organization. And don’t donate something you wouldn’t want to receive yourself. We have too many clothes, so much that we can’t even begin to sort through it all. We have nowhere to go with all of the people who want to help. Too many cooks in the kitchen. We have to turn you away from volunteering, but also we will make you feel like you’re not doing enough in this time of crisis. Actually, just give people money. But don’t give money to the wrong organizations or the wrong GoFundMe campaigns. And there is just a sea of GoFundMe campaigns. One meets its goal, another one starts. You can’t possibly donate to or share every single one of them. You can’t help everyone. You can’t save everyone. But if you don’t try, you’ve failed. But you should know that already. You should know what to do, and when to do it, and how to do it, even though these are unprecedented disasters in unprecedented times. Why don’t you know what to do, you dumbass, you complete moron.
Oh, and by the way, Donald Trump is president again, he’s already made quick work of passing extreme executive orders, and the media is tying themselves in knots trying to avoid calling what is clearly a Nazi salute, well, a Nazi salute.
All that is to say: The last few weeks have been, to put it lightly, challenging.
So it seems a little frivolous to spend time talking about movies, let alone movies deemed worthy of the shallow, the biased, the antiquated Academy Awards.
On the other hand, maybe a frivolous endeavor is exactly what I need right now.I need something to scrub away the ash and the muck that’s clouded my mind and my spirit for the last few weeks. I need to run my brain through a car wash.
So it might actually be the perfect time to talk about a quaint, pleasant little movie about young people falling in love at a state fair. Yeah, that sounds pretty nice right about now.
We’re going around in circles, just as they are on Earth. Only they think they’re getting somewhere. We know we’re not.
In a fictional town in rural Iowa, farmer Abel Frake (WIll Rogers) and his family are getting ready to go to—you guessed it—the Iowa state fair for a few days. Abel plans on showing his prized hog, Blue Boy, at the fair. Abel’s wife, Melissa (Louise Dresser) is taking batches of pickles and mincemeat to compete at the fair. Both of their children, Margy (Janet Gaynor) and Wayne (Norman Foster) are in loose situationships that they leave behind to attend the fair with their parents.
Once they arrive at the fair, each member of the Frake family goes about their Fair Business. Abel tends to Blue Boy, who suddenly appears to be ill. Wayne hustles at a ring toss game, winning each time he plays, infuriating the carny running the booth but impressing trapeze artist Emily (Sally Eilers). Margy meets local reporter Pat (Lew Ayres) and rides a roller coaster with him—a ride that ends up being pretty cozy and intimate, as Pat embraces a nervous Margy. After the ride, the two walk the grounds of the fair and get to know each other.
The next morning, both Mary and Wayne are in high spirits. Even Blue Boy seems to be perking up, as he’s no longer showing signs of illness. Margy meets up with Pat again, and he joins her at the competition where Melissa’s pickles and mincemeat are being judged. Melissa ends up winning the grand prize for both, and Pat takes her picture for his write-up in the paper. He and Margy split off again to watch a horse race, and they confess their love for each other during a walk through the woods later that night.
Wayne, meanwhile, joins Emily for a drink at her place, ditching the hog contest that his father has been preparing Blue Boy for. Emily very easily seduces Wayne, and it’s heavily implied that she takes his virginity. At the hog contest, it appears all is lost when Blue Boy falls ill again, but he perks up when a hot Lady Hog passes by his pen, and Blue Boy ends up winning the Big Hog Prize, or whatever it’s called. Blue Boy, now fully revived, becomes so horny at the sight of this gorgeous sow that he causes some kind of hog fight at the contest. Doesn’t matter, though, because he still won. No takey-backsies!!
On their last night at the fair, both Wayne and Margy leave with broken hearts—Wayne, who is fully prepared to marry Emily after knowing her for all of three days (slow down, my guy!) gets dumped by Emily, despite her confession that she loves him, too. Margy, on the other hand, breaks things off with Pat, scared that he will never be satisfied settling down in the country with her when he’s now used to
I never realized what a strain it was to get what you want in the worst possible way.
I was vaguely familiar with State Fair as a musical—it wasn’t a musical I had ever seen, and I never listened to the songs from it, but I knew of it. That counts for something, right? I never knew anything about the plot or the characters. I didn’t even really know when the story was supposed to take place—I think in my mind I pictured an extended version of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence from Mary Poppins, except more American. To be fair, though, I kind of wish everything was an extended version of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence from Mary Poppins.
Instead, it felt a little bit more like the extended version of the first fifteen minutes of The Wizard of Oz, right before Dorothy’s house is scooped up by a tornado and whisked off to Munchkinland, except with fewer evil dog-haters and more mature themes.
So basically, I really enjoyed this!
I don’t know, there was something so refreshing and cleansing about watching a movie about having a nice time and falling in love at a fair. I, myself, have always romanticized the fair. It’s a perfect setting for falling in love! What’s more romantic than cuddling up and overlooking an infinite horizon from the top of a ferris wheel? Or locking eyes over a piping hot corn dog? Sometimes they even have a ride called the freaking Tunnel of Love! I can’t prove it definitively, but I’m firm in my belief that the fair was created to get people to hook up, and State Fair further points to the validity of that thesis. Here we have two people, already involved in established relationships (which, granted, were less than satisfying) who end up enamored with other people, in just a matter of days. All because of the raw eroticism of the state fair.
I was also immediately charmed by this warm loving family, and found myself wanting to be part of it all. I wanted to sink my teeth into one of Melissa’s award-winning pickles. My heart dropped in fear every time I thought Blue Boy might not make it to the prized hog contest, let alone win the whole thing. I badly wanted to stay up all night with Margy and gossip about her fling-turned-romance with Pat. I wanted to console Wayne after his rejection and reassure him that trapeze artists really ain’t all that. They’re a sweet family, and they deserved all the success and happiness that this story gave them!
I recently went to a screening of the 2000 comedy Best in Show, where actor John Michael Higgins did a Q&A. He told a lot of great stories and had some wonderful words of wisdom about filmmaking and storytelling, but there was one theme that he kept hammering home that I’ve been thinking about a lot, especially in the context of State Fair. He spoke about his character in the movie, Scott, and how his relationship with Stefan, played by Michael McKean, were the only happy characters in the movie, and therefore they had the least amount of scenes, because happy people are boring to watch.
I see his point, and to an extent I agree, especially where comedy is concerned, but I do think this depends a lot on context. State Fair isn’t a strict comedy—but it’s not exactly a drama, either. I guess if I had to shoehorn it into a genre, I’d just call it a romance, without tying it to any one specific tone. And the characters are, largely, happy. They have their share of challenges, but overall the stakes for these characters are very, very low. And everything just kind of works out nicely for them, pinned with a big beautiful prize-winning blue ribbon. There isn’t much friction, and what little conflict they have is squashed fairly quickly and easily. It doesn’t sound very compelling, and yet somehow, it works?
I credit the success of this narrative to the performances. Janet Gaynor is quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses of the 1920s and 30s. She’s incredibly alluring, her big doe eyes drawing you in. She’s easy to fall in love with, making her an easy choice for the lead in a classic love story. And pairing her with cutie pie Lew Ayres? Ooh baby, that’s a recipe for romance. I rooted for those two crazy kids to work out just based on looks alone, and I don’t care how shallow that makes me sound. If I can’t root for two hot people to make it, what can I root for?
And along with the blossoming young love, we also have the relationship between Abel and Melissa to keep us anchored. These two old sweeties hold a lot of respect, admiration, and love for each other, which is clear in their daily, borderline mundane interactions. There’s a comfort and familiarity between them that’s clear from the jump, and when we get to the end, with Abel and Melissa able to finally enjoy the rides at the fair together, you see them reliving their youth, giggling as they ride on carousel horses together, mirroring the lively, flirtatious glee of their own children during their separate rendezvous. It’s nice to see these two hardworking characters let loose and get back to what likely brought them together in the first place—it’s never established this way, but you can easily imagine Abel and Melissa falling in love at the fair over a game of ring-toss, or as they brush hands reaching for the same kernel of kettle corn. See, there are, in fact, layers to this seemingly simple narrative!
Is State Fair groundbreaking cinema? Far from it. The production design was elaborate and fun to look at, from the family farm to the carnival rides on the set of the fair, but other than that it wasn’t a particularly striking movie, visually speaking. It’s a film whose success lies solely on the shoulders of the actors, and they do a great job of carrying it exactly where it needs to go. And when your world is on fire and your soul has been put through the wringer, a light, breezy, uncomplicated romance can be the exact balm you need to soothe you.
Sometimes you seem like something I’ll wake up from.
Quick Facts:
Nominated for 2 Academy Awards, won none
Best Picture
Best Adaptation (Paul Green and Sonya Levien)
The first of three film adaptations of Phil Stong’s 1932 novel; the other two adaptations, from 1945 and 1962, were both musicals with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Due to the Hays Code, a re-release of the film in 1935 had to have a scene following Wayne and Emily’s rendezvous removed. The scene has the characters talking off-screen, with the camera fixed on a disheveled bed and discarded lingerie. This scene has never been recovered. Yet another reason to hate the Hays Code.
Stray Notes:
It must be said again: I love these cute opening titles!
Janet Gaynor is so beautiful and expressive—I could simply get lost in those eyes!
Quaint and inoffensive so far. Possibly boring? We’ll see.
Abel’s just a guy who friggin loves his hog.
Like what The Wizard of Oz would be if Dorothy never stepped into Technicolor.
“A ride on the roller coaster would do you good.” — Sister you’re not wrong!
Wayne’s innocence and earnestness are endearing
Ugh I LOVE roller coaster cinematography
Lew Ayres 😍
Pat is cute! A little creepy but mostly cute!
Oh no, does Blue Boy die?
Okay, I’m starting to like this. A lot. Yes, I AM getting caught up in the love stories!!
Wait, do the hogs fall in love??
Margy & Pat are so so sweet!!
Wow I really need to become a judge of a pickle contest.
She’s da freakin’ Pickle Queen!
…AND da freakin’ Minced Meat Queen too!
Sweet!! Cute!!!
This fella’s got a way with words!
Love??!?
Okay, that ROBE!!
Oh I hope these hogs were treated okay on set…
These hog judges are very funny
He’s da freakin’ Hog King!!
Love to see dudes complimenting each other on their hogs.
At this point, with all of Wayne’s talk of visiting his male friend and spending the night, I’m shocked his parents don’t suspect he’s gay.
This is so cute. It’s nice to see even the parents have a youthful, sincere affection for each other.
Okay what the hell is with people in this era falling in love so quickly??
“A trophy today and a ham tomorrow.” — Ouch, cold-blooded, wtf.
Ugh, show me the smooch!!
CUTE!!!
My Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Next Up: Cavalcade (1933)