Le balourd

The Boob is a charming silent comedy about a farm boy named Peter Good (George K. Arthur) who is in love with a girl named Amy (Gertrude Olmstead). Amy, as is so often the case, doesn't like Peter back. So, to prove himself to Amy, Peter dresses up like a cowboy and goes after bootleggers. Wait...what? Yeah, it's a little dumb plotwise but it's cute and funny. Nice performances from Arthur and Charles Murray as Cactus Jim. Contrary to the way the film is advertised on TCM as well as the DVD cover, it is not a starring vehicle for Joan Crawford. Joan has a small part as a revenue agent (!). This is also an early William Wellman film before he made it big with "Wings."

Country bumpkin Peter Good is heartbroken to see his crush Amy fall for city guy Harry Benson. Hard-drinking Cactus Jim gives him a cowboy makeover, but it doesn't work on the girl. He suspects that Benson is a bootlegger and intends to take down the criminal.

I'm not here to sing high praises for this movie. My best complement goes to the dog. It's not great cinema, but the story is functional. There are fine elements. Peter and Cactus Jim are fine. I wouldn't give two seconds to Amy. She's meaningless. I don't really understand the premise of the old lady. It should be more compelling for the three characters and the dog to go off on an adventure together. Whatever. I like the dog.

There's a minor subgenre of silents in which a small town full of country folks somehow supports a lavish speakeasy filled with hundreds of folks in tuxedos, until the country folks toss them out. This has some connection to 1920s reality, as little towns comfortably in the sticks suddenly found themselves a short drive from a big city by car, and easily corrupted by big city money; places like Cicero and Calumet City, Illinois became wholly owned subsidiaries of the Chicago mob, and even Southern Wisconsin, for instance, is dotted with roadhouses and "inns" boasting "Al Capone slept and gambled here." You rarely if ever see the big city in movies like The Country Flapper, Delicious Little Devil, The Strong Man or The Boob; the tuxedo-wearing swells seem to generate spontaneously at night, like mushrooms.

The Boob is one of these tales and it suggests that by 1926, the subgenre was familiar enough that it could be kidded and caricatured along the way; the movie is full of broad, humor as well as a special effects dream sequence that seems to have walked straight in out of Winsor McCay's Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend. George K. Arthur is The Boob, Peter Good, whose girl May has fallen for the big city swell who runs the speakeasy (which, speaking of lavish, was apparently a redressed Ben-Hur set!).

After an old-timer teaches him the rudiments of being a rootin-tootin' gunslinger, he sets out after the speakeasy and its owner like Bill Hart in Hell's Hinges, and in a farcical manner reminiscent of The Strong Man, he does bring it down, if not exactly as he planned. If you doubt that The Strong Man was the model, note that Joan Crawford turns up in the decidedly thankless, if at least impressively feminist, role of a big city law enforcement agent whose bestowal of approval on Arthur helps him eventually win May over.

This movie just aired the other night for the first time on Turner Classic Movies. Although I missed the first few minutes, it is a lousy slapstick comedy with George K. Arthur in the lead as a dumb farm boy trying to help the law capture some bootleggers. Joan Crawford is the high point here, in one of her first films. She has a small supporting role as Jane, and Crawford herself also hated this movie. She thought she was being punished by MGM for getting this part. Earns *1/2 stars out of four.

The Boob features the talents of George K. Arthur as a naive country boy who is trying very hard to impress a young lady Gertrude Olmstead, but she can't see him for beans, much preferring the slick talking city guy Antonio D'Algy. He even puts on a big cowboy outfit, but Olmstead laughs at him, saying he's just a Tom Mix wannabe.

This was my first exposure to the comic talents of George K. Arthur whose career sputtered to a halt with the coming of sound. The role he plays here would be the kind that Joe E. Brown would do in the Thirties, Red Skelton might try in the Forties and after his split from Dino, Jerry Lewis might have a go in the Fifties at.

There's rumor of bootlegging being done in the area and guess what, D'Algy's at the bottom of it. I think just about anyone else can figure out where the rest of this film is going.

Former Mack Sennett employees Hank Mann as the soda jerk and Charles Murray as the grizzled old time western sidekick to Arthur are featured. Murray has a very nice turn as a man who just because Prohibition is in the land is not going to let that stand in the way of that old western tradition of the saloon. In fact I've often wondered what happened to the saloon in Prohibition times and The Boob does provide something of an answer.

The film might have been forgotten today, but for the presence of Joan Crawford in a secondary role as a Treasury agent. In fact that's a feminist concept many years ahead of its time. What must Eliot Ness have thought of this film? Crawford could have been given a lot more to do in this film. In her next film she would also be in support of a silent screen comic, Harry Langdon in Tramp Tramp Tramp.

The Boob was pleasantly amusing enough and it was interesting to see Joan Crawford in her silent days, something I hadn't done until now.