The Good Old Soak

"Good Old Soak" is the sort of sentimental film that MGM loved to put Wallace Beery in, as they created a persona of a big, lovable, good for nothing. In real life, most reports are that he was a horrid man...but this is neither the time nor place to get into that.

The story finds Clem a lazy drinking man who has barely worked a day in his life. His wife is exasperated with him....and with good reason. However, when his son steals her stocks and sells them to cover his own improprieties, Clem is more than happy to step in and take blame. After all, she already is at the end of her rope with Clem and is ready to toss him out...so he might as well go out with a bang. So what happens next? See the film.

This is a very enjoyable and sentimental film. While it isn't among Beery's best, it is quite good and the sort of old fashioned film they sadly don't make any more.

Wallace Beery slips easily into the role of a man who has never worked a day in his life, who drinks a lot of bootleg booze, is a constant trial to wife Janet Beecher, and has to solve all the problems when son Eric linden steals his mother's shares of stock, sells them to his uncle Robert McWade, and embezzles his firm's money on top of that.

Don Marquis may be best remembered for Archy & Mehitabel, but he also wrote novels and shows, and this amiable bit of corn among them; it had been filmed already in the silent days, and pretty much fit into the sort of programmer that Beery cranked out for MGM on this period. With Una Merkel, Betty Furness, Ted Healy, and Margaret Hamilton.