Casey at the Bat (1927) watch online HD

Ernest Thayer's poem is stretched out to more than an hour's length to mixed results.

Wallace Beery plays Casey as the sort of lumbering comic slob that would become his standard performance over the following decade and a half. Zasu Pitts is his shrinking girlfriend; Ford Sterling and Sterling Holloway are the comic villains and there's even the kid who adores Beery in the person of Specs O'Donnell.

Clearly first-time director Monte Brice -- he also co-wrote the screenplay -- is onto something, but equally clearly he is in over his head, trying to ride herd on four great comics. There is too much story for each of them and even if later variations would perfect the bits -- for Beery it seems to have been 1933's THE BOWERY -- Brice would apparently never get the hang of directing. He would return to pure writing and become part of Bob Hope's stable of gagmen for some great comedies in the 1940s.

Well first things first: The movie is a six-reeler and runs at least 68 minutes (not 60!) – at least in its excellent Grapevine Video version. Total length was originally 6,040 feet, so even the Grapevine version is missing something – possibly a sequence set on Coney Island which I don't remember seeing. Wallace Beery is in fine form, as you might expect, and receives excellent support from Zasu Pitts (as his hometown sweetheart), Ford Sterling (as the opportunistic baseball scout and swindler), Spec O'Donnell (who has more sense than all the grown-up characters combined) and Sterling Holloway (as Casey's self-elected manager). Zasu, of course, enacts her usual character as a dizzy dope, while Wallace Beery is just as blustering here as in many of his sound features. This movie was very ably directed by Monte Brice from a screenplay by Jules Furthman, no less!