Success (1931)
6/10
"Tonight's the night, honey."
8 December 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Blind as a bat Elmer Pringle wants to marry Molly Kelly (Helen Lynd), but needs her Dad's permission to offer a marriage proposal. So as the story progresses, and Elmer repeatedly proves he can't see a thing in front of his face, I begin to wonder how he ever managed to spot pretty Molly in the first place. I guess that's something the writer overlooked.

Anyway, Molly's Dad is a rabid baseball fan, and he wants her to marry a baseball player. Dad by the way is portrayed by John Hamilton, and this is the earliest film appearance I've ever seen him in, looking like a much younger version of Perry White from the mid-Fifties TV show, "Adventures of Superman". Elmer gets so flustered with Mr. Kelly that he blurts out "I want your wife for my daughter", but the baseball absorbed father blows him off rather quickly.

Remaining undeterred, Elmer signs up with a local ball club, the back story of which is never offered, in as much as there's no way he could have made the Astoria team with his obvious vision problem. Making an unexpected catch in right field and handing up an accidental home run manages to win the old man over, but I have to say, if I were Molly, I'd have been on full alert for future errors in the romance department.

And now that I think of it, maybe it wasn't just Elmer who had eyesight issues. If you catch this short flick, check out the angle of right field directly behind first base. It might be the film makers located a ball field that was designed by engineers who couldn't see straight themselves.
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