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Following, but not to the letter, the stories concocted by Author Booth Tarkington, Penrod (Leon Janney) steals a letter which his sister is writing to an admirer, reads it aloud in lieu of an English composition. He and his friends belong to the In-or-In Club of which Penrod is president. When obliged to initiate a sniveling little teacher's pet, they paddle him till he needs a doctor, slick down his hair so thoroughly with tar that he makes his next appearance with a shaved skull. Penrod and his friend Sam have a fight at a birthday party. Penrod's dog dies and is buried near the clubhouse. A boy named Bitts gets his father to buy the lot on which the clubhouse stands but Penrod's father buys it back again. The clubhouse is a cozy shanty, ornamented outside by a piece of tin, a portion of rubber-hose, furnished inside with barrels of paint, old packing boxes, a tin-gavel and a periscope made out of a broken mirror. Most enthusiastic members are two small blackamoors, Herman Washington (James Robinson) and Verman Washington (Robert Dandridge), who are so young & ignorant that they are unable to read the club regulations.
Leon Janney is a little too pretty and a shade too self-conscious for Penrod but his laugh, so incongruous with his speech that it sounds like a ventriloquist's giggle, is the most infectious sound in the picture. Sam (Junior Coghlan) has a flat Irish face, eyes that narrow pleasantly in anger; the short right with which he starts his fight with Penrod is better timed than Carnera's (see p. 22). Good shots: nice little Georgie Bassett doing a minuet at the birthday party while Penrod and Sam are fighting upstairs; the In-or-In Club preparing to initiate a new member. Bad shot: Penrod whittling with his forefinger on the back of his knife blade.
Palmy Days (United Artists). Eddie Cantor belongs to the school of clowns whose humor derives from ineffectuality; a certain eccentric excitability makes him sometimes hilariously funny. His gaiety is without grace; it lacks the thin, almost horrible insanity of the Marx Brothers and it is seldom frankly pathetic, like Chaplin's. He is a culprit from a comic strip and no one would be surprised if, when something hit him on the head, it gave the sound of "plop" or "zowie."
Like Whoopee, his most recent picture, Palmy Days (produced by Samuel Goldwyn) is in musicomedy form though not in technicolor. The setting is a baking factory with a gymnasium on the roof. Here the comely girls who work in the factory are seen going through body-building exercises which they do not seem to need. Cantor, stooge for a fortune teller who has hoodwinked the factory owner, takes charge of the plant as efficiency expert. He proves his efficiency by showing the owner how to make a funny noise, by putting on a floorshow at the bakery's lunch room, in which he wears blackface and sings. Finally, as usually happens to him, Cantor is captured by the tallest lady in the cast (Charlotte Greenwood). According to the definitions by which Whoopee was fun, Palmy Days, though it contains jokes as old as the one about the capital of the U.S. being half what it used to be, would be funnier. Good shot: Cantor, disguised as a French savant, telling the fortune teller how to tell fortunes.