Back in 1988, Paramount released a handful of their classic silent film titles on VHS. Of the 8 titles made available, only one, Erich von Stroheim’s THE WEDDING MARCH, has yet to make it to DVD or Blu-Ray. In that 1988 set was the W.C. Fields comedy RUNNING WILD from 1927. Fields made 8 silent films for Paramount between 1924 and 1928 of which 4 are now lost. IT’S THE OLD ARMY GAME (1926) had been a lost movie until its recent rediscovery. The fact that cult icon Louise Brooks has a prominent supporting role may have had more to do with its restoration and DVD release than W.C. Fields did.
The term “the old army game” is vintage slang for a con such as the shell game where Fields outsmarts the huckster or a big swindle like the one Louise Brooks’ boyfriend engages in by selling swamp water lots in Florida to the townspeople. The movie is really about capturing two classic Fields vaudeville sketches on celluloid. The first is “sleeping on the porch” where he tries to go to sleep in various locations while trying to escape a variety of loud noises. The second is “the picnic” where he and his family have a picnic on the lawn of a private estate, damaging most of the property in the process. Both routines would reappear in his 1934 sound film IT’S A GIFT.
Fields plays Elmer Prettywillie (another of his great character names), a small town druggist with an aggravating group of customers. Louise Brooks is his young and attractive clerk whose spinster aunt (Blanche Ring) has a crush on Fields. A real estate hustler (William Gaxton) arrives in town and falls in love with Brooks so she persuades Fields to let her boyfriend sell real estate out of his drugstore. When the boyfriend is arrested for fraud, Fields must drive to New York City to try and straighten things out. Not used to NYC traffic, he gets involved in a series of accidents and winds up destroying his car completely. The bit with the mule is priceless.
The film was shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios in Queens and on location in Manhattan. Louise Brooks was 20 years old at the time and had known Fields for many years as they both worked in the Ziegfeld Follies. She respected him and had nothing but good things to say about him (a rarity for Brooks) and he treated her with a fatherly concern. William Gaxton in his first movie playing the boyfriend was a rather dull affair but the character parts featuring a number of Fields’ longtime cronies are marvelous. The director, Eddie Sutherland, would later marry Brooks (his second of 5 wives) but they were married less than 2 years..
As mentioned earlier, IT’S THE OLD ARMY GAME was long considered to be a lost film until a copy was located in the Library of Congress. Back in 2018, thirty years after they first offered their silent movies on VHS, Paramount decided to release restored versions of some of those titles on DVD. They include THE COVERED WAGON, OLD IRONSIDES, BEGGARS OF LIFE (Louise Brooks’ best American film), three Gloria Swanson movies, RUNNING WILD, and the oddball comedy WHAT WOMEN WANT. The discs were released in partnership with Kino and while they are not fully restored, all the movies look remarkably good.
The Capsule Critic 