Life Begins at 40 (1935)

Kenesaw H. Clark, owner and editor of the local small-town newspaper where the subscriptions are usually paid off in farm produce, comes upon young Lee Austin, just out of jail and about to commit a crime. Clark takes him under his wing to put him on the straight and narrow, and also serves as Cupid in Lee's courtship of Adele Anderson, and gets himself in wrong with Colonel Joseph Abercrombie, the town banker and political boss. Losing his paper, Clark picks out the laziest man in town, T. Watterson Meriwether and runs him as a opposition candidate against Abercrombie. Believing that there is something strange about the hatred that Abercrombie and his son Joe have for Lee, Clark digs up the files of the crime that sent Lee to jail. Clark, with the aid of Meriwether and his hog-calling relatives, breaks up the Colonel's hog show/political rally, and then learns and proves that young Joe Abercrombie had stolen the money instead of Lee.