It’s the Old Army Game **** (1926, W C Fields, Louise Brooks, Blanche Ring) – Classic Movie Review 13,367

The very funny 1926 American silent comedy film It’s the Old Army Game stars the inestimable W C Fields as small town general store owner Elmer Prettywillie, whose customers are as grouchy and rude as he is.

Director A Edward Sutherland’s very funny 1926 American silent comedy film It’s the Old Army Game stars the inestimable W C Fields as small town general store owner, druggist Elmer Prettywillie, whose customers are as grouchy and rude as he is.

Prettywillie’s sole pleasure in life is his pretty clerk Mildred Marshal (a radiant Louise Brooks), but he is bothered by her homely maiden aunt (stage actress Blanche Ring, the director’s real-life aunt), who has an unrequited crush on him. He is also bothered by a neighbour’s bratty baby, whom he tries to smother to stop it crying, but the baby grabs a large mallet.

Of course Fields’s inimitable voice is much missed, but the movie, running in a series of revue sketches, is hugely inventive and entertaining. Essential classic W C Fields. Unfortunately, of course, Brooks and William Gaxton draw the short straw as the love interest in a W C Fields comedy.

The scenario by J Clarkson Milleri and Thomas J. Geraghty is based on the revue The Comic Supplement by Joseph P McEvoy and Fields, and includes several classic routines from Fields’s stage plays.

The Army Game of the title is in a shell game confidence trick that Prettywillie observes being played: ‘It’s the old army game.’

Large sections of the film, including the picnic and sleeping on the porch scenes, are incorporated into Fields’s hilarious sound remake It’s a Gift (1934).

Though reported as lost in the 1960s, happily it survives intact. It is preserved complete in the US Library of Congress. The out of copyright silent full movie is available on the Internet. The version on You Tube with piano accompaniment runs 104 minutes. The version on Wikipedia runs 75 minutes.

It’s the Old Army Game – Wikipedia

A 2018 75 minutes DVD release has a newly written organ music score played by Ben Model.

Car driver Fields and passengers Blanche Ring, Mary Foy and Mickey Bennett received minor bruises when a staged Ford automobile accident went wrong on April 13, 1926, when they went through a papier-mâché wall and down the embankment to the shore of the bay.

Eddie Sutherland and Brooks met on the set of It’s the Old Army Game and were married shortly after production wrapped in July 1926. They had an unhappy marriage, with numerous reports of infidelity on both sides, and divorced in June 1928. By 1927 Brooks had become infatuated with laundry chain owner George Preston Marshall, and divorced Sutherland, who was distraught and tried to take his life with a sleeping pills overdose.

Brooks was a sexually liberated woman and did not discourage rumours that she was a lesbian, revealing some lesbian dalliances, including a one-night stand with Greta Garbo.

Brooks notes in her 1982 book Lulu In Hollywood that the picnic scene was filmed on the lawn of El Mirasol, the Palm Beach mansion of financier J P Morgan’s partner Edward T Stotesbury.

Brooks recalls work with William Gaxton, saying she knew ‘our parts as the love interest in a Fields comedy meant nothing.’ Brooks said she had never seen the film.

The upstairs hallway of Elmer’s house is also used in W C Fields’s The Dentist.(1932).

The cast

The cast are W C Fields as Elmer Prettywillie, Louise Brooks as Mildred Marshall, Blanche Ring as Tessie Overholt, William Gaxton as George Parker, Mary Foy as Sarah Pancoast, Mickey Bennett as Mickey, Josephine Dunn as Society Bather, Jack Luden as Society Bather, George Currie as Artist, Elise Cavanna as near-sighted woman, John Merton as Fireman, and Rose Elliott.

Previously reported lost W C Fields films So’s Your Old Man (1926) and Running Wild (1927) also survive.

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,367

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