The Beach Club

Set by the beach, this thing has a free and lighthearted air. Billy Bevan visits the beach club for drinks and pool, and while it starts of charming enough, it quickly descends into 15 minutes of fat jokes, as Bevan, who doesn't exactly have the most athletic build himself, finds various ways to make fun of the obese husband of an old flame. If you're into fat jokes then you might like it, but I only laughed once - when Bevan's pants catch fire and to put it out, they roll him up in a rug and throw it in the pool. Being in the rug and not being able to see what is going on around him, Bevan yells out, 'Call the plumbers, the place has flooded!' When that's the best joke you know things are light on.

Oh yeah, and loads of beautiful women stand around in the background of every shot doing not much. I guess they were pulling any trick they could to try and prop it up.

In this Billy Bevan film, Billy plays a guy who is pretty much a jerk. While silent comedies with jerks as the protagonists could work, this one didn't work so well because Billy had no redeeming characteristics and just seemed nasty and selfish. I think if they'd toned this down, it would have made for a better picture.

When the story begins, Billy Doolittle (Bevan) is at the beach club...and making a nuisance of himself. This part of the film is reasonably funny. But when one of Billy's old girlfriends arrives with her new husband (Vernon Dent), the quality of the story drops considerably. This is due to some cheap fat jokes as well as Billy being a horrible person who seems to delight in hurting people.

I've seen several other Billy Bevan films and enjoyed them. This one, in contrast, doesn't work very well because you really disliked the guy in the lead. Now I am NOT saying a silent comedy needs to have a super-nice guy. After all, in some of Chaplin's films the Little Tramp was also a jerk...but so was the foil and usually this heavy was MUCH meaner and the film gave you some way to like and relate to the lead...but not in "The Beach Club" where Billy is awful and Vernon an innocent guy being abused for laughs.