Steamboat Round the Bend
1935 film
Steamboat Round the Bend is a 1935 American comedy film directed by John Ford, released by 20th Century Fox and produced by Fox Film Corporation, based on the 1933 novel of the same name by author Ben Lucien Burman. It was the final film made by star Will Rogers and was released posthumously, a month after he was killed in an airplane crash on August 15, 1935.
Plot
A con man enters his steamboat in a winner-take-all steamboat race in the 1890s with a rival while attempting to find an eyewitness that will save his nephew, who has been wrongly convicted of murder, from the gallows.
Doctor John Pearly, who sells Pocahontas patent medicine that is mostly pure alcohol, buys a broken down paddleboat steamer and intends to spend his sunset years leisurely cruising the Mississippi River with his nephew Duke as crewman. Duke shows up with a young uneducated girl, Fleety Belle, in tow, saying he has killed a man who forced his attentions on her. It seems to be a clear case of self-defense and having faith in the Justice System, Rogers convinces Duke to give himself up to the local sheriff, Rufe Jeffers.
Jeffers is a good natured butterball who does his best to make Duke comfortable under the circumstances, including putting on musical saw concerts for his fellow inmates. Pearly isn't pleased with Fleety Belle's presence. But when her cruel, whip-wielding father arrives to drag her home, Pearly chases him off with a carving knife. They are friends from then on, and he teaches her to be an apt co-pilot of the Steamboat.
“Steamboat Round the Bend” enters the record as 1935 film. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Steamboat, Round and Bend can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2121348. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1935 and 1933.
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This entry incorporates text from “Steamboat Round the Bend” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.