Judge Priest

Judge Priest, a Confederate veteran in a Kentucky town in 1890, hears cases from his porch and his heart; his nephew wants to marry a girl of unknown parentage, and a stranger's assault case turns into a story about the war. Will Rogers, doing almost nothing, is the whole film. Henry B. Walthall, the Little Colonel of Birth of a Nation, gives the courtroom speech; Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel are in the household, and the film's Black characters are its period's. Fox cut a lynching sequence, and Ford put it back in The Sun Shines Bright twenty years later. From Irvin S. Cobb's stories, 1934.