Francis the Talking Mule as a cultural artifact -- Garbo

Recently I've resumed work on a history-based project. Much of that involves immersing myself in American culture, high and low, of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The film "Francis," about a talking mule,  and its sequels, were huge as America moved from the Forties to the Fifties. 

There were seven (yes, 7!) movies -- six starring Donald O'Connor, one with Mickey Rooney -- in the Universal franchise.

In addition to the movies, Francis was all over pop culture. Just to begin with, there were two different records by Chill Wills, the actor who voiced the famous animal:

                               "A Mule Is A Fool" played on a vintage record player:

                 "Francis the Talking Mule" on the Capitol Records label.

In the late 1940s, old-time radio was fading but still happening, and Francis could be heard over big floor model receivers and table radios too. 

In an episode of "Hedda Hopper's Hollywood,"  Francis (well, Chill Wills) was the first guest. After the talking mule is introduced,  Francis' hooves are heard clopping into the studio where Hedda Hopper's gossipy showbiz radio show was recorded. Early in the interview, Francis demands one of the gossip columnist's elaborate hats -- once, of course, holes have been cut out for his earsYou can hear all of that here. 

                                         Hedda Hopper

Televsion superseded radio by the early 1950s, of course. Francis was a celebrity guest on a popular stump-the-panel TV program:

The mule als  appeared in children's television programming. The UPA Gerald McBoing Boing cartoon "How Now Boing Boing" features the public-speaking course which taught the famous mule to talk. 

And then there ere all the kinds of print media. For a while was a Francis comic strip in daily newspapers; one of the plotlines involved a bank robbery.

And naturally, just a place in the funnies wasn't enough. There was also a comic book!

 With Francis appearing in every media outlet of the late 1940s and into the 1950s, it would be easy to forget that it was ever a book.  The Francis franchise began with stories author David Stern, an Army captain,  submitted to Esquire magazine. The stories were gathered and published in book form as Francis in 1946. Stern followed up with a sequel, Francis Goes to Washington, published in 1948.

 Out of all that, what people really liked were the movies. The first film in the franchise made a lot of money for Universal. Despite competing against 1950 blockbusters like "Cinderella," "Father of the Bride," "All About Eve," and "Broken Arrow," "Francis" ranked among the top 20 box office hits. Over the years, just the first film featuring the famous talking mule has earned Universal Studios nearly three million dollars in purchases and rentals. And of course there were six more movies in the series. 

It would be easy to dismiss Francis, in book or movie form, as a silly novelty. And the quality of the movies slipped downhill with every new release. The  director, Arther Lubin, who made the first six talking-mule pictures then had a hit on televison with -- wait for it -- a talking horse. And yep, that was just a silly thing.

                            Earworm Warming: A theme song that will stick in your head

If we're talking goofy, we can go all giant invisible rabbit. The 1944 play "Harvey" was released as a iilm starring Jimmy Stewart, and it arrived in movie theaters the same year "Francis" did. The main character in "Harvey" is cheerful but an alcoholic who talks to everyone he meets about his invisible friend. There's a family plan to lock him up in a sanitarium, where he will be given an injection of Formula 77 which will do brain damage -- I mean, cure him. 

What used to be tragic is now, apparently, hilarious. 

But in David Stern's book Francis, the narrator, Lt. Stern (in the films Lt. Stirling), is not a heavy drinker nor a huge challenger to social norms. He has no giant invisible rabbit. He's quiet about the talking (and flying!) mule who's a friend, a confidante, and a mentor to a lonely soldier. Stern has his reasons for keeping things on the q.t. After the magical mule instructs the wounded lieutenant on the use of a belt as a tourniquet, and then flies the wounded man to the hospital, the lieutenant corrects his early mistake of telling hospital staff what happened.  He goes from the regular ward to the mental ward. 

Stern said he wrote the first four pages of dialogue between Francis and an Army soldier stationed in Burma after looking at a blank wall for some time during his time editing an Army newspaper called The Midpacifican, published in Honolulu.

Unlike the harmless, goofy hero Elwood P. Dowd of "Harvey," the wounded soldier in Francis is scared and disoriented and in need of advice. He is hospitalized by Army doctors when he continues to insist that he can see and hear Francis, but in a middle chapter of the book, he leaves the ward and meets the talking mule under a banyan tree. Yes, the same type of tree under which the Buddha found his enlightenment. The mule recommends that his friend should not back off from the mental-illness diagnosis, but should use it to his advantage.

Half an hour later I arriveed at the banyan tree. I'd run most of the way and was out of breath. Francis stood complacently in the shade. 

"So you managed to get out of the hospital, lieutenant," the mule said.

"I'll probably be court-martialed for this," I panted.

"Not if you're nuts," reassured Francis. "The Army'll just say you're a little screwier than they thought."

At the same time, Francis recognizes that the lieutenant sometimes needs tough love. 

"You need a nursemaid," Francis snorted. "But since the Army hasn't seen fit to provide its junior officers with such supervision, I must do the best I can." 

And sometimes the talkative mule is much less like a fairy-tale animal and more like a human pal, the kind of friend a lonely wounded man would like to have. Near the end of the book, Francis somehow hoists himself onto a bar stool (from which he'll have trouble dismounting later), and while Lt. Stern tries to get the drunk mule to go home, Francis says he loves his human buddy as much as if he had four legs. And in slurred speech, he wants reassurance that the lieutenant really likes him and isn't just using him to meet his own needs.  For a book about a man who answers when a mule talks to him, Francis really isn't goofy or silly, even if it makes light of some tough situations. 

Francis appeared on bookstore and library shelves in 1946, and the film version came out in 1950.  The summer of 1950 marked the start of the three-year war in Korea. Lonely lieutenants in Burma were not the only people feeling "screwy."  Germany had surrendered in May of 1945, and Japan in August of the same year.  But ending four years of American participation in a global battle couldn't just stop with war-is-over headlines and crowds celebrating in the streets. The postwar shift took years. The wounded and injured soldiers had to get medical treatment, everyone overseas had to be de-mobilized, and some people had to decide whether to become civilians or to re-enlist. And then -- before those decisions could be followed up with action -- American soldiers went back to the battlefield, this time in Korea. 

Two other 1950 movies, besides the box-office hits mentioned earlier, addressed. Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were silly and nostalgic in "At War with the Army," but in "The Men," moviegoers watched an entire ward of wounded vets struggle with physical and psychological problems. Meanwhile, the Francis movie series was getting ready to move on to "Francis Goes to the Races." 

America -- a country I love but will never understand. 

                        Jack Webb and Marlon Brando in "The Men" 

David Stern, from the Francis book jacket:

 When I joined the Army in 1943, I had been publishing a couple of newspapers. I told this to the classification interviewer, who dutifully recorded my civilian background on a large card. They say the Army always finds the job to fit the man. I was assigned as assistant on a garbage truck.

Circumstances led me, via Officer Candidate School, to Hawaii, where I was assigned as Co-Officer-in-Charge of an Army newspaper called Midpacifican. One night I was sitting looking at a blank, unpainted wall. To pass the time I wrote four pages of dialogue between a second lieutenant and an Army mule. I had no intention of writing more. But that little runt of a mule kept bothering me. With memories of OCS fresh in my mind I thought I might rid myself of the creature by shipping him off to become a second lieutenant. Francis outwitted me. He refused to go.

                                                         ********************

Extra stuff for this post:

1. It's hard to decide which Francis the Talking Mule movie I like least. The contenders are "Francis Joins the WACs" and "Francis in the Haunted House." Watch both trailers if you want to decide for yourself. 

                                  "Francis Joins the WACs"

                              "Francis in the Haunted House"

2. Leftover Fun Facts:

     a. The animal who played Francis was actually a female mule named Molly.  You can read about the "Mozark Mule" in this article. 

     b.  The horse who played Mr. Ed had the real-life name Bamboo Harvester. 

NOTES;

The Image from "Havey" came from this blog.

I grabbed the film still from "The Men" at this blog address

                                                                Garbo