GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

Cassandra Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

MartinHafer I am sure that nowadays the Li'l Abner comic strip loses a lot in translation. Its popularity over the years is one of those things that people today can't really understand. So, from the outset this weird little film has a big strike against it--especially because, by comparison, "The Beverly Hillbillies" is downright sophisticated.The film is set in the rustic village of Dogpatch--home of Li'l Abner and his kin. Oddly, Abner himself and his determined love interest, Daisy Mae, look relatively normal despite their clothes. But, as for most of the other major characters, they are, to put it bluntly, a group of freaks. Underneath tons of makeup and prosthetics, his parents and a few of the townsfolk look more like extras from the movie FREAKS than anything else! It's all rather creepy and comical. Sure, they did look a lot like the comic strip characters as well, but they just made me feel a bit repulsed.As for the film, there's a threadbare plot about Daisy Mae and Wendy Wilecat both wanting to get hitched to Abner. However, this plot doesn't even begin until late in the film. Instead, it's just a series of "comical" vignettes--most of which were never funny and only a few of which the audience might have laughed at in 1940. It's all rather sad seeing actors like Buster Keaton stuck in supporting roles, though for some of the old-time silent comedians (such as Chester Conklin and Al St. John), they are buried under so much makeup, wigs and prosthetics that you can't tell it's them--something I assume they felt grateful for when the film debuted.Overall, a one-joke film that is creepy and hard to watch from start to finish. The only positive value you might have is to use it to insult Southerners (and in particular, people from Arkansas and Tennessee)--but that would seem awfully cruel...unless you really, really hate them.

tedg Every urban culture has a myth about some primitive people that is essential to their identity. Often of course it is the original people that were displaced, and that's the most natural. The Nordic countries do it in this way. But that slot is filled in strange ways across the world. Brazil fills the spot in several ways, with natives, slaves, and the now relatively backwards Portugal being juggled.In the US, we do something similar, though we handle our native Americans differently. We handle our guilt by overly romanticizing them, a role they eagerly accept. (Indeed, they have reinvented their history around this notion of nobility.) But we do have what everyone else has in this myth of a simple people. You can see this in movies, naturally, as movies are where we as a society mainly maintain our persistent myths these days.So we have two types of movies that fit this. Blacks aren't allowed in this category. We handle them differently. Immigrants before the recent Hispanic wave of the 60s are particularly represented. The biggest recent example was "Big Fat Greek Wedding," which follows the rather strict model of embracing a sort of innocent stupidity while laughing at it. Its a sort of being in and being out at the same time.And we have slight variant on this, something I'll call the hillbilly movie. This usually IS hillbillies, Clampets, or Ma and Pa Kettles. The purest form has them puzzled by shoes or plumbing fixtures. This movie is in that tradition.Its a strange experience if you know the comic strip. That strip was highly political. It and "Pogo" were often the most intelligent things in US newspapers for decades. Al Capp was in a way the political opposite of Gary Trudeau who today does "Doonesbury," perhaps not as clever in narrative but very influential. The strip inspired the famous Lockheed skunkworks, which made secret spy stuff, the inspiration both in name and attitude.If you know the history and the strip, you'd come to this expecting a deeply political and introspective thing. Instead, this snaps to the hillbilly model, except the characters have prosthetics and histories that resemble their drawn forms.You might only want to watch this to see how easily movies embrace some of our cultural legacies and at the same time find it difficult to be insightful in useful ways.Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Jay Raskin I was pleasantly surprised watching this comedy for a number of reasons. First, it was not as low budget and amateurish as I expected. It was actually a quite respectable B movie with make-up, sets, stunts and camera-work that matched the level of W.C. Fields and Laurel and Hardy features of the time.Second, Buster Keaton's short role prefigured the third banana roles he would play in the American International Beach Movies of the 1960's. His on-screen time is less than five minutes, still, I suspect he had a lot more to do with the production of the movie than his bit part would indicate. The gags have a Keatonesque quality. For example the ending scenes of the women chasing men are reminiscent of the ending scenes in his "Seven Chances." The world of Dogpatch has a self contained, parody of the intellectual world quality, as does many of the comedic worlds created by Keaton (See his "Three Ages" for example.The humor in the movie foreshadows the hillbilly humor of the 1960's television series, "The Beverly Hillbillies." A recent Lucille Ball biog movie suggested that Keaton had played a major part in the success of the 1950's television series "I Love Lucy." If Keaton did play a role in designing some of the gags in this movie, one might suggest that Keaton was in some sense responsible for a great deal of the successful comedies of the 1950's and 1960's.On the other hand, the producers might have hired them only because they liked his silent film work and he might not have had any input to the film other than his two or three days on set in his bit part. I wonder if anybody else has any information about the role Keaton played in this still charming movie.

rsoonsa When LI'L ABNER was made, in 1940, Al Capp's comic strip of the same name was one of the U.S.'s favorites, with his hayseed creation finding himself in one jam after the other, without trying at all. A story by Capp is the foundation for this film, which holds a unique spot in cinema history, as it is the only attempt to precisely recreate comic illustration, utilizing makeup, costumes and exact phrasing (without interpretation). The plot and subplots generally revolve about the annual Sadie Hawkins Day celebration in Dogpatch, which presents area females with just about their only opportunity to catch a husband, by literally running down and snaring one of the town's fleeing bachelors. For those who remember the silent film era, this effort provides small roles for many pre-talkie stalwarts, including Buster Keaton, Edgar Kennedy, Chester Conklin, Al St. John, Lucien Littlefield, Hank Mann and Edward Brady. At times very reminiscent of Capp's drawing, the very tall Jeff York, billed as Granville Owen, is effective as Abner. Martha O'Driscoll, Kay Sutton and Billie Seward, as the three women most vigorously seeking marriage with Abner, do their hearty best with the thin scenario. More silly than cute, this picture is not marked by outstanding work from cast and crew, its significance coming only from the mentioned verisimilitude.