"Hearts and Diamonds" (1914) is a mildly amusing baseball short of 33 minutes with John Bunny and Flora Finch. The humor is rough, not quite slapstickish, but rough like the early, early Chaplins and much of the early teen one- and two-reel shorts before a quieter and subtler comedic sophistication worked its way into the sometimes violent humor of the late aughts and early teens. Bunny's a widower and Finch a widow. Finch likes baseball stars. Now, Bunny, not particularly tall, but rotund enough to get stuck in a cannon if it fired with heavy powder, and certainly no youngster, plays the owner/manager of a local baseball club, probably something like sandlot of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century up to the teens and twenties. To win the favor - perhaps the hand of - Finch, Bunny also will play to show Finch he's a - player... Some of the stuff is very cute, some of it quite humorous, and some of it just seems to fall flat. A lot of the rough stuff - especially what goes on between Bunny and his two daughters in the beginning of the film - is a lot rougher than what we'd accept as humor now. One amusing thing I found: the team against which Bunny's team must play to show off Bunny's baseball prowess has a pitcher named Matty Christhewson, obviously a play on the best pitcher in baseball in 1914, Christy Mathewson. Similarly, other names are funny in the cast: Tupper, Whipple, Toper Staggs, etc. Nice film to see Bunny and Finch. They were the cat's meow in the movies for comedy in 1914. Bunny died the very next year of Bright's Disease at age 51. Today he's nearly forgotten, as is Finch. He made 200 films in his short career, and she over 250 in a career that lasted another 26 years. She died in 1940 at the age of 72. This is a charming way to spend 33 minutes, light and airy, but with some rough and tumble just to keep the lids open and the mind from wandering.