Alternative Film Guide

Kino’s "Reel Baseball - 1899-1926" two-disc set has become one of that DVD distributor’s biggest sellers in their silent-film division.

Produced for video by Jessica Rosner, "Reel Baseball" includes the following:

On Disc 1: Headin’ Home a 73-minute feature starring baseball legend Babe Ruth (who himself was the subject of a 1949 biopic starring William Bendix) and three shorts: Kinogram, a one-minute bit with Babe Ruth; His Last Game a 1909 drama about a Native American who plays his last game (what follows isn’t pretty); and The Ball Player and the Bandit, a 12-minute 1912 short featuring popular actor Harold Lockwood. (Six years later, the handsome Lockwood, at age 31, succumbed to the Spanish influenza pandemic.)

On Disc 2: The 1919 feature The Busher, a comedy-drama starring Charles Ray — a major star whose ego was blamed for his dramatic downfall a few years later — in addition to future superstars Colleen Moore and John Gilbert. Disc 2 also includes several shorts, among them Felix Saves the Day, starring Felix the Cat; the 1922 experimental sound film Casey at the Bat, with DeWolf Hopper reciting Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s poem; an excerpt showing New York Giants manager John McGraw playing himself in the 1917 production One Touch of Nature; and the 33-minute "short" (or medium-length) Hearts and Diamonds, a 1914 comedy starring John Bunny, quite possibly the most popular film comedian of the early 1910s. (Bunny would die the following year.)

Those newly remastered silent films are accompanied by music composed by David Drazin, David Knudtson, and Ben Model.

Needless to say, many of those films are extremely rare. It was thus a tremendous pleasure to find them looking as good as technically possible on this DVD set.

Whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to baseball, "Reel Baseball" is a must for any serious film collector. As so often happens when it comes to old, rare, forgotten films, the artistic quality of, say, The Busher or Hearts and Diamonds is less important than what they have to tell us about a time and a place that no longer exist — even though, as those same movies show, we as human beings haven’t changed all that much (if at all) in the last century.

And by the way, Kino is currently offering a 30th anniversary sale.

The Joan Crawford Collection DVD Set

The Bette Davis Collection DVD Set

The Greta Garbo Signature Collection DVD Set

Carole Lombard, Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Cecil B. DeMille DVD Sets

The Doris Day Collection DVD Set

Errol Flynn Signature Collection

INSIDE MAN on DVD

Janus Films’ "The Essential Art House" DVD Collection

Lubitsch in Berlin DVD

Josephine Baker Collection DVD Set

Trackback URI | Comments RSS