It's the Old Army Game

It's the Old Army Game (1926)

Seven reels full of tricks and a big laugh with every trick

Druggist Elmer Prettywillie is sleeping. A woman rings the night bell only to buy a two-cent stamp. Then garbage collectors waken him. Next it's firemen on a false alarm. And then a real fire.

Date of release
1926-07-10
TMDB
5.0 / 10 (12)
Runtime
1h 16m
Genres
Comedy
Director
A. Edward Sutherland

Casting

Interesting facts

It's the Old Army Game is a 1926 American silent comedy film starring W. C. Fields and Louise Brooks. The film was directed by Eddie Sutherland and co-stars Sutherland's aunt, the stage actress Blanche Ring in one of her few silent film appearances. The film is based on the revue The Comic Supplement by Joseph P. McEvoy and Fields, and included several skits from Fields' stage plays. The "army game" in the title is in reference to a shell game, a confidence trick which Fields’ character observes being played. "It's the old army game," he says, sagely.

Production

The film was shot mainly at Paramount's Astoria Studios facility in Astoria, Queens, and in Manhattan, and is preserved complete in the Library of Congress. A few outdoor scenes were filmed in Ocala, Florida, and Palm Beach, Florida. Behind schedule at the time, the picnic sequence was shot on the lawn of El Mirasol, a Palm Beach mansion owned by Wall Street investment banker Edward T. Stotesbury.

On April 13, 1926, while shooting a scene at Steinway Gardens at the edge of Flushing Bay, New York City, in which a Ford automobile driven by Fields was to go through a papier-mâché "breakaway" wall parallel to an embankment and then turn up the road, the automobile instead went through the wall and down the embankment to the shore of the bay.

A 2018 DVD release, 75 minutes long, contains a newly written organ music score played by noted silent film restorist Ben Model.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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