Grandpa's Girl

The only way Kathleen Clifford can go to Europe with grandpa Jack Duffy is if she is expelled from college, so it's no time at all before Duffy gets the news. He tells her he is disowning her and finding a grandson who can play pinochle. Miss Clifford puts on a three-piece suit, slicks her hair back and soon has the job, plus a fiancée in Babe London. Complication ensue, as you might expect.

Miss Clifford did this sort of thing often. She appeared in vaudeville and on Broadway as a male impersonator, often billed as 'the smartest chap in town.' Her pairing here, with Duffy, who used his make-up skills to transform from forty to 70 and still play the bass saxophone and take bone-breaking falls is inspired. The sequence where they wind up putting on boxing gloves and going at each other is hilarious.

Usually I am not fond of the Christie comedies of the 1920s, which often seem a series of gags linked by some mechanical exposition, but this one is very funny.

Miss Howard appeared in only a dozen and a half features and shorts before she retired to Yugoslavia with her banker husband. Duffy's screen appearances petered out in the early 1930s, whereupon he worked as a make-up man.