The movie was Marked Money, a 1928 production from Pathé starring child actor Junior Coghlan and
George Duryea, the true name of the 1930’s Western star Tom Keene, and the
ambiguous notes on the movie from the download site made it look like it was a
Western about counterfeiters. Wrong on both counts: it starts out on board a
sailing ship but it’s clearly set in 1928, and “Boy” (Junior Coghlan, whose real
name was Frank Coghlan, Jr.) is on board when two plug-ugly thugs attack one of
the officers because he won’t tell them where a small box containing $25,000 in
cash is hidden on the boat. The victim survives long enough to be taken off the
ship and to the home of the (apparently retired) Captain Fairchild (Bert
Woodruff), but then expires, and on his body they find a note saying that he
wants Captain Fairchild to raise the boy and the $25,000 is to pay for his
education and all other expenses taking care of him until he’s an adult. Boy is
shown as a precocious little kid — he cuts off a piece of chewing tobacco and
uses it himself, and when he sees Captain Fairchild’s model ship he points out
that the rigging is wrong. It’s obvious the people who made this movie —
writers George Dromgold, Howard H. Green, Sanford Hewitt and John T. Krafft,
and director Spencer Gordon Bennet (who had a long career but in the sound era
specialized in serials — he did the second Columbia Batman serial, Batman
and Robin, and their two Superman serials, Superman and Atom-Man vs. Superman) — were channeling Charlie Chaplin’s The
Kid and Jackie Coogan’s marvelous
performance in it, and particularly Coogan’s precociousness; Coogan made being
precocious the stock in trade of virtually every child actor in the movies
until 1934, when the enormous success of Shirley Temple transformed the default
setting for depicting kids in movies from “precocious” to “cute.” Marked
Money isn’t a Western and doesn’t have
anything to do with counterfeiters — we’re given no evidence that the $25,000
is anything other than the Real Federal Reserve McCoy — and though imdb.com
marks it as “melodrama” it’s closer to comedy than anything else. Captain
Fairchild has a daughter, Grace (the quite lovely and appealing Virginia
Bradford, who for some reason didn’t attempt a transition to sound and made
only one more film, One Man Dog,
in 1929), who shows up in aviator drag and is warned by the family servant,
Bill Clemons (Tom Kennedy, who did
go on to a talkie career as a character actor, usually playing dumb cops), to
get out of those clothes before she sees her dad, who doesn’t like pilots or
anything to do with flying.
As luck would have it, Grace is dating Clyde
(George Duryea a.k.a. Tom Keene), who’s a Navy aviator — she solemnly warns him
to take the wings off his uniform and as (bad) luck would have it, he drops
them into Captain Fairchild’s soup and the good captain digs them out again and
realizes not only that his daughter is fooling around with planes, she’s in
love with a guy who flies, too. Of course Clyde’s pilot skills come in handy
big-time when Grace is kidnapped by the bad guys (ya remember the bad
guys?) who have grabbed her in hopes she’ll
know where the $25,000 is (ya remember the $25,000?) — they’re pretty hapless bad guys, given to
staring into the house through the mail slot and looking for all the world like
they’re going to seek admission into a speakeasy by saying “swordfish.” (Like Command
Performance, Marked Money is the sort of bad movie that keeps reminding you of
great ones.) The climax is an aerial dogfight in which Grace is thrown into the
back of a plane but comes to long enough to pilot herself and Boy to safety,
while the baddies are brought to book and Clyde shows off his own aerial heroics
in bringing them to justice. There’s a tag scene in which Boy ties a “Just
Married” sign and some string with tin cans tied to it to the back of the plane
in which Clyde and Grace take off on their honeymoon. Marked Money isn’t a great film, but it’s charming and cute, and
Coghlan, Duryea/Keene and Bradford are all appealing in their roles (which
helps take the edge off a typically obnoxious, hammy performance in the role of
Captain Fairchild — though I wouldn’t blame Bert Woodruff for this because in
movies this old playing a father, especially one whose kid was already an
adult, was practically an engraved invitation to overact), and it was nice to
see it with the original RCA Photophone soundtrack attached. Though Marked
Money was shot as a silent film, it was equipped
with a recorded music score that was sent out as part of the film so theatres who
had wired for sound and paid off their in-house musicians because they thought
their jobs would no longer be necessary could still show the film. Enough
movies equipped with recorded versions of the live scores that had previously
been played in-house came out and were advertised as “sound” that in some
cities the Better Business Bureau warned moviegoers, “‘Sound’ doesn’t always
mean ‘talk.’”
