Steamboat Round the Bend

Endings are important, and even in light comedies with adventure undertones, those endings end up helping to shape everything that came before it. I was a bit flustered by the first hour or so of John Ford’s Steamboat Round the Bend, finding things to like but frustrated at the extraordinary loose nature of the telling, but the ending brought everything together in rip-roaring fashion. Will Rogers’ final filmed role before his airplane crash that killed him ends up being a fancifully enterta...