Cours, ma fille

Run, Girl, Run (1928)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Decent Mack Sennett produced short has Carole Lombard playing a great track runner but she just can't keep her mind on the sport. A tough but dingy coach (Daphne Pollard) and the Dean (Lionel Belmore) try to keep her focused but without much success. RUN, GIRL, RUN isn't the greatest comedy you're ever going to see but there are enough laughs to make it worth watching plus you've got a 20-year-old Lombard years before she'd become famous. I think it's Lombard fans who are going to enjoy this the most. Fans of hers will know that she appeared in several Sennett shorts but this one here allows her to be the main attraction. For the most part I thought she was good in the role even though she basically just had to look pretty and flirt with boys. Pollard was also quite good in the film as she got most of the comedy bits with the coach who is obviously really dumb. The majority of the laughs are some rather mean-spirited ones against an overweight girl on the track team. Obviously there are a lot of fat jokes, which was pretty normal during this era. Those looking for a laugh-a-minute type of film will want to stick to Chaplin or Keaton. This here is certainly far from perfect but it gives us a chance to see the legend Lombard.

This little two-reeler manages to insult overweight people and African-Americans before the first reel is over! One of the "gags" concerns Daphne Pollard, as the track team coach, hunting for Carole down in "Cupid's Alley", the local make-out spot. She approaches one car with dark windows and flings the door open to reveal a black man, seen earlier as a handyman, sitting in the car with half a dozen live chickens. He does a huge "I'm caught" double take. Ouch. The film's only interest is that Carole Lombard is in it. She and Daphne Pollard make quite an unusual team--coming from complete opposite ends of the spectrum. Sadly, by the time this film was made, the Sennett Studio had pretty much run out of steam.

We can be grateful for the survival of this short comedy nowadays, because it provides a tantalizing glimpse of the 19 year-old Carole Lombard. She's certainly the best reason to seek it out, but unfortunately Run, Girl, Run isn't much of a showcase; it's a half-hearted effort produced during the Mack Sennett Studio's waning days, after many of the best directors and gag writers had departed. Carole's primary task on this occasion is to primp and look pretty while much of the comic business is handled by diminutive, energetic Daphne Pollard. The underrated Miss Pollard provides the funniest moments, from the opening sequence right down to the surreal wrap-up gag, while Carole serves as little more than a decorative bystander. On second thought, "bystander" may not be the most accurate term for Miss Lombard's role on this occasion, for she plays a collegiate track star who spends much of her time running, and the rest of it canoodling with her boyfriend. They could have called this two-reeler "Hot to Trot."

The action is set at a women's college called Sunnydale, "where the girls learned the Three R's—Romeos, Roadsters and Roller-Skates." (That introductory title card is a tip-off that Sennett's writers didn't work too hard on this assignment.) The opening sequence is set on a practice field where the girls prepare for a big track meet against the school's arch rival. Daphne plays Minnie Marmon, the girls' athletic coach, and early on she performs a neat bit of physical comedy, running for the high jump as her pants gradually slide off. Daphne's good, but too much of the ensuing humor is at the expense of a hefty young woman wearing a highly unflattering pair of shorts. Carole, on the other hand, looks great and is granted a couple of lovely soft-focus close-ups. For some reason her character name is Norma Nurmi. We soon meet Norma's boyfriend, a military cadet who specializes in "heartillery" (groan). The young lovers plan a moonlight rendezvous, well aware that they're breaking school rules.

The bulk of the film takes place that night, as Norma and her beau attempt to meet for their forbidden tryst, the coach tries to keep Norma in the dorm, and the Dean, who is something of a dirty old man, sneaks around spying on the girls. This sequence offers the film's best and worst moments, back-to-back. On the minus side, there's some unpleasant racial humor involving an African American man caught stealing chickens—all too typical of Sennett comedies from this period—and a cat mistreated for an easy laugh. "Bunion pads" are stuck to the cat's feet, causing him to stagger uncomfortably, trying to shake them off. (Larry Semon did something similar to a cat in his short The Grocery Clerk in 1919, and I didn't find it funny there, either.) On the plus side, this sequence offers Carole a moment or two to prove that she could be more than merely decorative: her exaggerated tip-toe as she attempts to escape the dorm is amusing, and a little later, when Coach Minnie catches her reaching for the window, she smoothly turns the move into a sudden burst of calisthenics. It's a long way from My Man Godfrey, but even this early in her career, Lombard demonstrates that she already knew a thing or two about physical comedy, and how to play to the camera.

The climax is the big track meet between the girls of Sunnydale and their rivals from Primpmore. The funniest thing about the finale is the hilariously fey referee, a man who looks like a character out of a Fleischer cartoon. As in the opening scene, it's Daphne who delivers most of the laughs. It is she, not the nominal star of the show, who is featured in the film's strange final moment, when Coach Marmon knocks herself silly against the goal post and we're treated to a distorted, fun-house mirror image of her face, meant to suggest that she's dazed. Looks like the writers needed to wrap up this puppy somehow, and decided to go a little bizarre at the finale.

Carefully selected clips from Run, Girl, Run were used in Robert Youngson's delightful compilation The Golden Age of Comedy, but it turns out this is one of those films that plays better in brief excerpts than in its entirety. It isn't easy to find any of Carole Lombard's silent movies, so her fans will want to see it regardless. Even so, if more of her Sennett comedies become available for home viewing, I hope they'll turn out to be better than this one. It would be nice to find a showcase for Carole as a gifted comedian as well as a beauty, seeing as how she was both.

Daphne Pollard plays a character similar to the one she played in THE CAMPUS VAMP--a short and rather manly young lady who has a lot of spunk, but not much else. Carole Lombard, who was also in THE CAMPUS VAMP, plays a star athlete who has very little interest in working hard and is a bit selfish--such as losing a race because she took time in the middle of the race to powder her nose. Despite her being a bit of a jerk, everything, naturally, works out in the end.

This college comedy is very broad in its comedy--not just the powder puff gag, but also featuring a very overweight Madalynne Field. Miss Field is obviously NOT a real athlete and I think the purpose of having her in the film is laugh at a fat girl--not the most noble of story ideas. Still, the short is reasonably interesting despite the quality of the humor and selfishness of Lombard's character. A decent time-passer.

New starlet Carole Lombard, just nineteen in 1928, made about two dozen comedy shorts for producer Mack Sennett in the late 1920's. In most of these films her roles are quite small, but she has the lead in RUN, GIRL, RUN a charming and rather fascinating spoof of women's collegiate athletics during the 1920's.

Tiny character actress Daphne Pollard is the coach for the college's team of girl athletes, and she has her hands full given most of the girls spend more time chasing boys than training or taking sports seriously. With her job on the line, Pollard vows to watch over her best runner Lombard who alas appears the most boy crazy of the bunch.

RUN GIRL RUN is one of the better Sennett comedies of the late 1920's and it's nice to see a silent comedy short where the girls dominate it and the guys are the ones in bit parts. Teenaged Carole doesn't get many gags to handle but obviously, she already had a flair for comedy and had star potential. The delightful Miss Pollard hams it up expertly and gives an excellent performance. Madalynne Field as the lone fat girl on the team manages to deftly play up the caricature with good humor and appeal and is a very good sport and clearly had the makings of a good comedienne. (Field and Lombard became best friends and Madelynne became Carole's personal assistant when her career petered out.)

This little comedy short doesn't have much of a plot but it is funny and rather racy for its era (Carole sneaks back in the dorm on a ladder but is unaware she has entered the male dean's room and is undressed down to her slip when Pollard barges in, same dean is said to "keep an eye on the girls" and is then shown peeping through a keyhole). The screen titles are often quite amusing (Carole's track team hasn't won "since the Dead Sea turned sick" and coquette Carole "once ran a mile in almost nothing and was nearly expelled because of it"). This movie was a very popular title on the Super 8mm home movie market back in the 1970's but hasn't been seen much since but you can still find it online or on dvd if you look for it.