The Jones Family in Hollywood (1939)

Film: The Jones Family in Hollywood (1939)

Stars: Jed Prouty, Spring Byington, Kenneth Howell, George Ernest, June Carlson, Florence Roberts

Diretor: Malcolm St. Clair

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2022 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different Classical Hollywood star who made their name in the early days of television.  This month, our focus is on Spring Byington: click here to learn more about Ms. Byington (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

As we mentioned in our kickoff article about Spring Byington, the actress was never really a leading star in the way that many of her era were.  Even compared to a character actress like Marie Dressler, she wasn't a leading woman in a traditional sense, and mostly spent her career playing mothers-and-wives until her big break in December Bride in the 1950's.  That doesn't mean, though, that she wasn't at one point a household name, and that came about rather early in her film career.  While Byington was in big movies throughout the 1930's that are remembered today like the 1933 Little Women (with a young Katharine Hepburn) and the 1938 Best Picture You Can't Take It With You (for which she won her only Oscar nomination), Byington's chief fame during this era was actually in a series of pictures that are almost nonexistent today: The Jones Family movies.  We're going to talk about why these were such a big deal in a second, but I'm going to unorthodoxly kick off our film first, today's being the 13th of the seventeen films that were made in the series.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie starts out in a small town where Mr. Jones (Prouty), an important member of the American Legion and seemingly the town's mayor, has been invited to go to Hollywood.  Initially he has only intentions of taking his wife Mrs. Jones (Byington), but soon his entire family, including children Jack (Howell), Roger (Ernest), and Lucy (Carlson), as well as his mother Granny Jones (Roberts) are along with him.  Once there, Lucy and Jack both fall for movie stars, but neither realize these relationships aren't on the up-and-up.  Jack's girlfriend is trying to use him to better understand how small town girls think for a role she's playing, while Lucy's beau, is well, he's trying to get laid but obviously a movie from 1939 isn't going to be that overt.  The film ends with them all realizing, after a lot of confusion, that they're better off back in their small town life than trying out the big wheels of Hollywood.

The movie has a couple of fun gags (Roberts as the grandmother gets all of the good one-liners...Byington, our June star who normally would get this type of part, is mostly just window dressing), perhaps because it was written by Buster Keaton, at this point in the twilight of his film career.  But for the most part it's pretty banal (though I want to point out for the record that if Roger wasn't meant to read as gay, the filmmakers failed in that enterprise with my modern lens).  In a lot of ways this recalls something like the Blondie pictures over at Columbia or MGM's successful Andy Hardy movies.  In a couple of decades, this would've been an Ozzie & Harriet style sitcom, but without the advent of television, this was just a second feature for some of Fox's more successful films in a double billing.

You might ask why I watched this film, nearing the end of Byington's time with the series (she'd appear in all 17 of the films, and in fact Prouty was the only actor of the main family who didn't appear in all of the movies).  The reason is that the Jones Family movies are basically forgotten, in a way that the Andy Hardy and Thin Man movies of the era have not been.  It has never been released on home video, and I watched this one on YouTube.  If there's a copy of Every Saturday Night, the first film in the series, I can't find it online, and these have such little cultural cache that The Jones Family Go to Hollywood is about to get its first review ever on Letterboxd as soon as I click publish on this.