Returning home from the War of 1812, John Breen, a Kentucky militiaman, falls in love with French exile Fleurette de Marchand. He discovers a plot to steal the land that Fleurette's exiles plan to settle on. Breen is mistaken for a land surveyor and is presented with a theodolite and sets out with Willie to look as if they are surveying (they do not actually know what to do).
A further pretense occurs when Breen sits on stage with a group of fiddlers and feigns being able to play.
The story is set in Alabama in 1818, including the city of Demopolis, which was founded by Bonapartists. The Bonapartists had been exiled from France after the defeat of Napoleon I at the Battle of Waterloo. Congress authorized the sale of four townships in the Alabama Territory in March 1817 at two dollars per acre, and Marengo County was created on February 7, 1818 from lands that had been taken from the Choctaw Nation under the Treaty of Fort St. Stephens. It was named after Spinetta Marengo, Italy where Napoleon defeated Austria in 1800 in the Battle of Marengo. The county seat, Linden, Alabama, was named after Hohenlinden, Bavaria where Napoleon won another victory against the Austrians. The Bonapartist colony did not succeed overall, in part due to surveyance issues that contribute to the plot of the film and in part due to practical difficulties in establishing the vineyards.[2][3][4]
Production notes
This is one of only five times that Hardy worked without partner Stan Laurel after they'd teamed up as Laurel and Hardy. Hardy also appeared with Harry Langdon in Zenobia (1939), and in three cameos: Riding High, Barnum & Ringling, Inc. and Choo-Choo! It was the only time that Hardy appeared in a film with John Wayne, though the two had worked together onstage a year earlier in a touring charity production of What Price Glory? starring Wayne, Ward Bond, and Maureen O'Hara, and directed by John Ford.[5]
Re-broadcast by Arte 1 February 2017, the film credits celebrated composer Georges Antheil (1900-1959) with the music (background score including among things stirring "variations" on the Marseillaise).
The film was the second one produced by John Wayne for Republic Pictures. It was stuntman Chuck Roberson's first work with John Wayne; Roberson frequently doubled Wayne throughout his career.[6] Wayne desired a French actress for the lead role and considered Danielle Darrieux, Simone Simon and Corinne Calvet but was forced to use Republic Studio's Vera Ralston causing other Czech and Austrian actors to be cast to match Ralston's accent.[7][8]
The Fighting Kentuckian was one of only four films in which John Wayne wore a buckskin suit with a coonskin cap, the others being the 1930 widescreen epic The Big Trail (in the Grand Canyon sequence shot on location), Allegheny Uprising (1939), and as Davy Crockett in the concluding battle footage in The Alamo (1960). Allegheny Uprising and The Fighting Kentuckian, shot only a decade apart (as opposed to three decades apart, as is the case with The Big Trail and The Alamo), are often confused with each other because of Wayne's identical buckskin outfit and coonskin hat worn throughout both pictures.
