The New Klondike

'The New Klondike' has a misleading title. This movie doesn't take place in the Yukon. The title refers to the (real-life) Florida land boom of the 1920s, when developers made huge amounts of money out of properties in that formerly obscure state: Florida was 'the new Klondike' because some land speculators were making as much money as was made in the Klondike gold rush of 1898. Some of the Florida properties proved to be sound investments, while others were useless swampland ... so there's plenty of room for comedy with this premise. Unfortunately, there was only one really funny movie about the Florida land boom: 'The Cocoanuts', starring the Marx Brothers.

Thomas Meighan (not my idea of a comedian) portrays Tom Kelly, a major-league baseball player who was forced out of the game for a contrived reason clearly inspired by the 1919 Black Sox scandal. He ends up in Florida, where he teams up with an estate agent to sell housing lots to suckers. The estate agent is named Bing Allen: this movie was made a few years before Bing Crosby became famous, so I wonder where the scriptwriters got the name Bing. He's played by Paul Kelly in a very bizarre haircut. One of Bing's shills is named Flamingo Applegate, which has got to be the second-greatest character name I've ever encountered in all my years of movie-watching. (The all-time greatest is Chastity Pariah in 'Elvira, Mistress of the Dark'.) Another of Bing's shills is Bird Dog, a blonde floozy who suckers men into buying useless lots.

There's a prolonged comedy sequence that isn't remotely funny, in which Tom uses a brass band to play music that's supposed to prompt customers to buy his lots. The bandmaster plays different tunes to suit the personalities of different suckers. Unfortunately, because this is a silent film, the routine depends on intertitles to convey the song titles, leaving us to fill in the appropriate music.

Despite his haircut, Paul Kelly gives a better performance than this movie deserves: it would have been interesting to see him take over Thomas Meighan's role. (In which case, a guy named Kelly would be playing a guy named Kelly.) Lila Lee is quite beautiful and reasonably expressive in the feminine lead. But the characters are unsympathetic, the story is contrived, and I'll rate this only 4 out of 10. It deserves to be a 3, but I'm adding one point for that great name 'Flamingo Applegate'.

Home town hero Tom Kelly (Thomas Meighan) is set to pitch in the Major Leagues. He goes to spring training in Florida, but gets benched and cut from the team. He gets into real estate which is fraught with dangerous scams. He falls into one with swamp land.

There are elements that I like and some that I would change. I would make his home town much smaller. He should a farm boy from a rural community. I really like the fly over sequence. They probably had the plane for the afternoon and shot a bunch. I especially love flying thought the smoke. I love the Florida Fruit pin. I'm not that taken with the land deals story. This is fine although not actually funny.

Pitcher Thomas Meighan meets Lila Lee on the boat down to Miami. He's heading down for spring training, along with his buddy Paul Kelly, whom he wants to arrange a try-out for. But while Kelly makes it onto the team, Meighan is let go. He wanders around Miami, which is going through its real estate boom, and becomes the face of a real estate firm. He also buys the land his former team uses for training. This brings him into contact with the villains of the movie, who have been buying the land around the field with a view towards taking advantage of the tourism possibilities. They buy hm out at a substantial profit, and his former team mates pony up to partner with him in further deals.

There's some satire of the insane prices that a hotel room costs, and the hucksterism of the agents, as one man proclaims that there's no safer swimming in Florida, while he draws the clients' attention away from an alligator; we also witness another man selling real estate by claiming to be just like his potential clients, while a band plays carefully selected songs to lure them on.

Lewis Miles had directed two shorts and a feature in 1918-1919; this was his third movie since his return to wielding the megaphone the previous year. Most of this movie is taken up with the plot of Meighan and the baddies trying to one-up each other, and it's a pleasant movie for the dependable star and an able cast. Alvin Wyckoff's cinematography is a bit dimmed by age, but thanks are due, as they so often are, to the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for getting this one out of the archives.