Banjo on My Knee | |
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![]() Film poster | |
Directed by | John Cromwell |
Written by | Harry Hamilton (novel) |
Screenplay by | Nunnally Johnson |
Based on | Banjo on My Knee (1936 novel) |
Produced by | Darryl F. Zanuck Nunnally Johnson |
Starring | Barbara Stanwyck Joel McCrea Walter Brennan |
Cinematography | Ernest Palmer |
Edited by | Hanson T. Fritch |
Music by | Charles Maxwell |
Distributed by | Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation |
Release date |
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Running time | 95 minutes |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Banjo on My Knee is a 1936 American musical comedy-drama film directed by John Cromwell. [1] The film was nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Sound Recording category for the work of Edmund H. Hansen. [2]
Ernie Holley flees on his wedding night because he thinks that he has killed a wedding guest. His father Newt and his bride Pearl find him in New Orleans and persuade him to return home.
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Frank S. Nugent wrote:
If we are to believe the Roxy's "Banjo on My Knee"—and there isn't an earthly reason why we should—the picturesque shanty boaters of the Mississippi are nothing more than song-and-dance men in the rough, homegrown crooners, players of one-man bands or torch singers of limited range and a tendency to grow moist-eyed whenever they hear that old American folk-song 'The St. Louis Blues.' It is an unsettling premise, disillusioning and unthinkable, and it impels us to scowl fiercely at the ballyhoo artists who have been telling us that the new Twentieth Century-Fox picture "combines the setting of 'Tobacco Road' with the mood of 'Steamboat 'Round the Bend.'" It ain't no such thing. [3]