F Gwynplaine MacIntyre
'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'.
