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Well call me surprised. Watched this little low-budget film last night and just loved it, in no small part because of the terrific performance by Neil Hamilton. This was filmed in the mid-20s and again in the 40s. I'd never heard of it in any form.

Hamilton plays a WW I vet who's been in a hospital for 3 years. He's given 6 months to live so he bails and heads out into the world. Hitchhiking along a California backroad he decides to change direction and head toward the sea (the path not taken and all) and comes upon a little seaside farm (those were the days) where he finds Hobart Bosworth on the ground. He calls a doctor and they haul Bosworth away to the hospital but not until he makes Hamilton promise to tend his bees. Having nothing better to do, he agrees. He settles in with Emma Dunn as the housekeeper whose daughter (Betty Furness) is running away. There's also a know-it-all kid nearby (Edith Fellows). The storyline takes a few surprise twists. Old fashioned and effective story well done by Monogram.

Monogram could put out a very good product when they cared to, particularly in the 30's - it was later that the cheapness really showed.

KEEPER OF THE BEES was one of several literary adaptations made by the "old" Monogram studio, which flourished from 1931 to 1935. Their films weren't big productions, but certainly on a par with what other second-echelon studios like Columbia and Tiffany were turning out. In 1935, the "old" Monogram was absorbed into the new Republic studios. The Monogram that re-emerged in 1937 was a far lower-budget operation than the earlier studio bearing that name, but it had to be in order to maintain an assembly-line product schedule.

I'd forgotten that- and it explains a lot.

I've often thought that Monogram's 1934 MYSTERY LINER was an excellent example of what to do with a small budget. Nice story, excellent cast (lots of old character pros in small parts) and a simple but well photographed shipboard set. William Nigh was not a great director but he was an efficient one.

I liked The Nut Farm, it has a rather funny script by George Waggner. Monograms of that era could be dull at times, but they usually weren't terrible.

Even as late as '45, they sometimes pulled a rabbit out of their hat: Allotment Wives. Directed, also, by Mr. Nigh...though how could any director go wrong with Kay Francis at his disposal?

I really liked their art deco animated logo also... with those great trains...

Ed, with your recommendation, I checked on this title, first ordering and reading the book itself. Keeper of the Bees is a fascinating, wonderful book written by Gene Stratton-Porter, more famous for Girl of the Limberlost. This novel has three of four fabulous scenes and a romantic sensibility that feels like Borzage (I wish he'd done a silent version of the story). The closest thing in spirit to the book would be Borzage's Lucky Star. I highly recommend this book to anyone who likes literature from this period, where writers are not afraid to wear their heart on their sleeve, shirt and jacket!

Then I watched this Monogram 1935 version (the silent version, with Clara Bow, is sadly lost). The Monogram version doesn't even try to capture the sweep and romance of the novel. It does, however, follow the plot fairly closely. The leads do well, but the one person that really shines (in her one moment) is character actress Emma Dunn.

The film is most interesting as an example of an ambitious group of filmmakers trying to do as much as they could with very little money. The ending is so quick, it almost felt like they were counting the number of feet they had left in the camera!

Lokke Heiss wrote: The ending is so quick, it almost felt like they were counting the number of feet they had left in the camera!

Monogram was FAR from being the only offender, alas--abrupt & rather slapdash endings seem all too common in the '30s; a source of the greatest amazement to me, as any teenage usher could have told the moguls that the last few minutes of any picture leave the most indelible impression: a moving or memorable ending can make an audience forget much that was boring or otherwise ineffective in the preceding hour. If (as I once assumed) pictures were filmed as they are watched, from beginning to end, rushed endings might be excused as the result of exhaustion, but that not being the procedure at all, there IS no excuse beyond carelessness or apathy.

As rushed as the ending LOOKS, it's unlikely to have been the last scene shot, the quick-out ending most likely generated from a frantic scriptwriter who already had seventy pages and knew he couldn't go another page because that's how long the film was going to be. The idea of writing any kind of feature film using only sixty to seventy pages boggles the mind. I guess that's why Westerns were so popular. The guy, the gal, the horse and the bad guys meant you didn't need to spend much time to detail as the convention of the genre had done it for you.

I like to keep track of camera set-ups with a film like this, as that will really tell you what the filmmakers were trying to do. And they did have a reasonable number of set-ups, but clearly this was a one-take and move on film, so the actors have a certain frantic pace to their performances that recall the old days of soap operas where you just kept going no matter how badly you flubbed a line. For a laugh, check out the youtube of Dark Shadow bloopers. They make horrible line-reading mistakes, but instead of swearing, they just bite their lip and keep on going, real troopers.

Lokke, on your recommendation I'll look for the book. I'm not sure a big studio could have handled the storyline any better or could have dealt with the "spiritual" elements. I think the very lack of big budget helped keep the film simple and straightforward. I wouldn't mind seeing this one remade by an indie filmmaker.

You are right, it would likely have been botched, but it's all about understanding the sweeping romance behind the story. Borzage or Murnau could have done it. Like I said, a similar romantic vision is seen in films like Lucky Star.

Best 'meet cute' I've seen in a book. Our hero, WW I traumatized veteran, Jamie is out on a lonely beach at night, thinking dark thoughts as a storm whips through the area. He's sitting on an edge of a rock, and in the darkness and rain, doesn't know that a woman has sat down on the other side of the rock. Then, 'The raving wind from the west, shifted to the north, and it blew something across his face, something that was soft and silken, something tugging and pulling and plastering to him in the driving spray and beating rain. In dumbfounded bewilderment, he softly touched his cheeks, and across them there was streaming the silken banner of a woman's hair.'

So the romantic visual element is that the couple is sitting on opposite sides of the rock, and her hair whips over to brush against his cheek and forehead. How romantic! The Monogram film doesn't even try to do this, they don't have time to set this up. But I give the film credit for using a lot of the dialogue of the book.

Understand that this is the literature that Hemingway is rebelling against, so you have to just go with the sweeping plot points, this is not realism, but romance, but romance in my opinion, of the highest order, hooked into religious and theological questions about nature and God. There are at least four scenes in the book which are wonderfully constructed, one of which includes a 'battle of the bees' between Scout and a Woman from the City (a character not in the Monogram film).

Hemingway who? Phooey on Hemingway.

Sounds great. I just loved how the whole plot was based on misinformation he overhears in the hospital. Also with the Betty Furness character, you know something is amiss but you don't know what. Even with the lush romanticism omitted, the whole story, the very irony of a romance and paths not taken and all, just came to a surprising ending, which I just didn't see coming. I wonder how the 1947 film compares?

All I know is what I read on the IMDB page. Anyone know how hard the Tyrone Power version is to see?

Tyrone Power version?

Interestingly, the novel was published in 1925 and the first film was released in 1925 by Gene Stratton-Porter Productions. Not only does the (lost?) 1925 production boast Clara Bow in the cast, but Gene Stratton-Porter is also credited as playing Little Scout (Edith Fellows in the 1935 version). Stratton-Porter died in 1924 in a car accident and would have been over 60 years old. But she's also credited in the cast for Laddie and Freckles in 1926 and 28, respectively. She had a daughter Jeanette. Could this be a granddaughter?

drednm wrote:Tyrone Power version?

I misread another post that talked about Power. He would though, have been quite good in the lead role if it had been made as a A picture.

John Sturges WAS the director. I just looked at his filmography. The Satan Bug came after The Great Escape. Now THAT'S a dramatic fall-off. Funny too, because on paper, The Satan Bug must have looked like a sure thing.

Just watched another of this author's works in Romance of the Limberlost (1938) and really liked it. A definite low-budget effort, but a solid cast in a good story (with tones of spiritual knowledge) deliver the goods. Jean Parker, Eric Linden, Marjorie Main (superb), Betty Blythe, George Cleveland, Sarah Padden, and others. Well worth looking for despite the bad copy and low budget.

I'm reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and will save Limberlost as an antidote after I am done with it.

I think a certain collector who pops up here has a print of the Sturges one and speaks of it highly, but it's one of those movies you can't clear for a showing because nobody will cop to being its owner and accept the check.