Some things never change. Thomas Meighan plays Tom Kelly, a baseball player unfairly fired from his team, who finds a second career in real estate speculation, during a Florida land boom of the 1920's. Tom is a pretty honest and optimistic guy, who has to deal with all kinds of liars and cheats to get ahead. He does have the help and support of his ex-team mates, and his best friend, Bing Allen (Paul Kelly) another ball player. Paul Kelly is very funny as the stereotypical dumb jock, but he's lovable and loyal to a fault. Lila Lee is the love interest, Evelyn, and she is wonderful here, and I'm inspired to look for more of her films. Overall, this is a good comedy that also shows you some hard truths about human nature. Seen at the 2025 San Francisco Silent Film Festival, at the Orinda Theater. With live musical accompaniment by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra. 52 Years in 52 Weeks: 2025
I'm very interested in the 1920s Florida land boom, but not as much as I'm interested in 1920s baseball, so I had to see this one when I found out about it. There's maybe less baseball than I would have liked but more than enough real estate to make up for it.As far as baseball goes, there's one flashback scene that's really well done, in that it uses the sort of board that was employed to show the progress of games before the advent of radio (like a contemporary online game tracker) to depict the events of a ballgame. I was reminded of the description in the nineteenth chapter of Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River of baseball fans in a North Carolina town watching the results of the 1912 World Series being posted pitch by pitch in a shop window. The result looks a lot better than it probably would to try to recreate a real baseball game on camera, and it's a lot narratively clearer, too, since what actually happened in the game matters to the movie.The ballclub here that just won the World Series (the description of the team on Letterboxd is inaccurate) is just identified as New York, which in this time period could just as well have been either the Giants or the Yankees, the two best teams in baseball. The opponent is identified as Chicago, which gives no real context because the Cubs and the White Sox were both equally mediocre in the mid-'20s. The team uniforms look more like the Giants than the Yankees and the powerful manager seems a little more like John McGraw of the Giants than Miller Huggins of the Yankees (although maybe I just don't know enough about Miller Huggins to see him here); on the other hand, the manager's anxiety about his star ballplayer replacing him as manager is more reminiscent of Babe Ruth's desire to manage the Yankees than it is of any Giant, and the colonel who owns the ballclub is plainly modeled after Colonel Jacob Ruppert of the Yankees rather than Charles Stoneham of the Giants. I guess it's a composite.The story is entertaining and the restoration is impressive. Thomas Meighan was in his late forties at this point, too old to really be a baseball player, but he does a good job as a ballplayer who knows in his heart that he's washed. Wikipedia tells me that he was a big Florida booster himself and that not long after this movie he decided to go into real estate, which is amusing. I appreciated that the theater was giving away movie-related merchandise, even though of course nobody will ever know what it means; during the Q&A session after the screening, one of the men responsible for the restoration suggested that a majority of the living people to have seen this movie were with us in the room.
A fun and exciting satire combining America's two favourite pastimes, baseball and land speculation. Constantly funny and on the ball, it retains many of it's jabs and pointedness to this day. Fitting to have watched this in the new new new Klondike... I wonder how many AI ads I passed on the subway getting here today, everyone's just scamming everyone.
