The Golf Specialist **** (1930, W C Fields, Shirley Grey, Allen Wood, Allan Bennett, William Black) – Classic Movie Review 9781

Director Monte Brice’s funny 1930 20-minute comedy short The Golf Specialist from RKO Pictures is W C Fields’s first talkie. It is shot in Fort Lee, New Jersey the site of many early film studios.

Absconding con artist J Effingham Bellweather (W C Fields) enters a Florida hotel and offers to teach the flirtatious House Detective’s Wife (Shirley Grey) how to play golf. They go with their incompetent Caddy (Allen Wood) to the golf course, but Bellweather never gets to hit the ball, constantly interrupted by comedic distractions.

The Sheriff and the House Detective come  to arrest Bellweather for various crimes, including ‘eating spaghetti in public’, ‘jumping board bill in 17 lunatic asylums’, ‘failure to pay installments on a strait-jacket’ and ‘possessing a skunk’.

Bellweather to the Caddy: ‘I’d like to wring your neck. Like to wash it first and then give it a good wring. Give it a ring they’d hear for miles and miles.’ Fields also has classic lines such as ‘I would never hit a woman, not even my own mother’ and ‘Stand clear and keep your eye on the ball’, which he uses again in the golf scene in The Dentist (1932).

Fields reprises the film’s entire golf scene in You’re Telling Me! (1934).

The cast are W C Fields as J Effingham Bellweather, Johnny Kane as the hotel desk clerk Walter, John Dunsmuir as the house detective, Shirley Grey as the House Detective’s Wife, Naomi Casey as Bratty Little Girl, Allen Wood as the Caddy, Jack Irvin as Deep Sea McQuirk, and Harriet E MacGibbon as Woman Walking Dog, and Allan Bennett and William Black as Guests in Lobby.

The Golf Specialist is one of three W C Fields short films that came into the public domain after the copyright lapsed in the Sixties, along with The Dentist (1932) and The Fatal Glass of Beer (1933).

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9781

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