(Note: This an old review based on the poor-quality copies--probably ripped from a grey-market video--that've been circulating online over the years. Reportedly, a better and longer print has appeared at festivals.)
About a decade past America's entry and involvement in the Great War, Hollywood seemed to ramp up its production of WWI epics. At least eight of the barely more than two dozen nominated films for the inaugural Academy Awards are set during the war. "The Patent Leather Kid" doesn't fare well in comparison to fellow nominees such as "Wings" (1927) or "The Last Command" (1928), nor to earlier box-office hits "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1921), "The Big Parade" (1925) and "What Price Glory?" (1926). Even though its war sequence is my favorite part, including tanks and a camera shot from underneath one, it doesn't reinvent the genre the way, say, did the aerial photography of "Wings."
The first part of the film follows the titular Patent Leather Kid during his career as a boxer and his budding romance with the girl, who has equally silly nicknames throughout, namely "Curley" and "Baby." The two boxing scenes are unremarkably shot from long-shot positions during the actual fighting. Better is the editing of the scenes with events external to the fight. For the first bout, the Kid and Baby flirt between rounds by trading insults, and for the second match, the Kid is rattled by the patriotic fervor building up outside the arena.
When Uncle Sam enlists, Baby begins declaring the film's moral incessantly and insensitively. A scenes where she berates the Kid for not removing his hat for the flag and ends up removing it herself from his head and tossing it seems especially unintentionally funny today for its old-fashioned sexism and unflinching nationalism. For one, Baby wears her own cap throughout the scene, and she also shows a letter of her volunteering to sing and dance for the war effort--seeing as she's "only a girl" and, therefore, "can't fight" (later, she becomes a hysterical nurse). Meanwhile, her and others ridicule the Kid as a "slacker" for not enlisting. Baby tells him, "Kid -- lovin' yer country is like lovin' yer mother -- ya just can't help it." The Kid is drafted anyways. Although it might seem that the film's final scenes would contradict the original patronizingly patriotic message--wherein the Kid goes from hiding scared during battle, to seeing his best friend and former trainer die, to posing Atlas style as a war hero, to almost dying and becoming a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic--nope, instead, it concludes with him praying to God to let him stand and salute the flag, which he then miraculously does.
"The Patent Leather Kid" is similar to fellow-nominee and WWI film "7th Heaven" (1927) in that it's a dated melodrama, with some also-dated comedic moments peppered throughout (this one features racist humor involving knocking people unconscious and some stupid bits regarding stuttering and saluting), a blunt and simplistic moral, a maudlin war injury, and two characters in a romantic relationship, for whom I find to be mostly intolerable. Except "The Patent Leather Kid" is a bit worse--at least "7th Heaven" is elevated some by its Best Actress winner Janet Gaynor. Had the Oscars existed in years past, Richard Barthelmess would've surely deserved some nominations, but he's as unexceptional in his this nominated performance as his eponymous character here, who is remarkably unsympathetic for a quadriplegic war hero--nor sympathetic when he's a boxer who's mistreated by his manager. He also knocks a woman unconscious. At least, Barthelmess demonstrates some restraint in his performance in comparison to teenage co-star Molly O'Day, who as Baby, goes overboard with the histrionics by the end. It's bad enough the leads refer to each other as "Kid" and "Baby," but they also act like their namesakes. They're two insolent straw men: one an uber-nationalist who berates men to risk their lives, the other a selfish coward who skips the front-page war announcement to find the notice of his fight in the newspaper and blames his country for his boxing performance. I guess they deserved each other.
About a decade past America's entry and involvement in the Great War, Hollywood seemed to ramp up its production of WWI epics. At least eight of the barely more than two dozen nominated films for the inaugural Academy Awards are set during the war. "The Patent Leather Kid" doesn't fare well in comparison to fellow nominees such as "Wings" (1927) or "The Last Command" (1928), nor to earlier box-office hits "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (1921), "The Big Parade" (1925) and "What Price Glory?" (1926). Even though its war sequence is my favorite part, including tanks and a camera shot from underneath one, it doesn't reinvent the genre the way, say, did the aerial photography of "Wings."
The first part of the film follows the titular Patent Leather Kid during his career as a boxer and his budding romance with the girl, who has equally silly nicknames throughout, namely "Curley" and "Baby." The two boxing scenes are unremarkably shot from long-shot positions during the actual fighting. Better is the editing of the scenes with events external to the fight. For the first bout, the Kid and Baby flirt between rounds by trading insults, and for the second match, the Kid is rattled by the patriotic fervor building up outside the arena.
When Uncle Sam enlists, Baby begins declaring the film's moral incessantly and insensitively. A scenes where she berates the Kid for not removing his hat for the flag and ends up removing it herself from his head and tossing it seems especially unintentionally funny today for its old-fashioned sexism and unflinching nationalism. For one, Baby wears her own cap throughout the scene, and she also shows a letter of her volunteering to sing and dance for the war effort--seeing as she's "only a girl" and, therefore, "can't fight" (later, she becomes a hysterical nurse). Meanwhile, her and others ridicule the Kid as a "slacker" for not enlisting. Baby tells him, "Kid -- lovin' yer country is like lovin' yer mother -- ya just can't help it." The Kid is drafted anyways. Although it might seem that the film's final scenes would contradict the original patronizingly patriotic message--wherein the Kid goes from hiding scared during battle, to seeing his best friend and former trainer die, to posing Atlas style as a war hero, to almost dying and becoming a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic--nope, instead, it concludes with him praying to God to let him stand and salute the flag, which he then miraculously does.
"The Patent Leather Kid" is similar to fellow-nominee and WWI film "7th Heaven" (1927) in that it's a dated melodrama, with some also-dated comedic moments peppered throughout (this one features racist humor involving knocking people unconscious and some stupid bits regarding stuttering and saluting), a blunt and simplistic moral, a maudlin war injury, and two characters in a romantic relationship, for whom I find to be mostly intolerable. Except "The Patent Leather Kid" is a bit worse--at least "7th Heaven" is elevated some by its Best Actress winner Janet Gaynor. Had the Oscars existed in years past, Richard Barthelmess would've surely deserved some nominations, but he's as unexceptional in his this nominated performance as his eponymous character here, who is remarkably unsympathetic for a quadriplegic war hero--nor sympathetic when he's a boxer who's mistreated by his manager. He also knocks a woman unconscious. At least, Barthelmess demonstrates some restraint in his performance in comparison to teenage co-star Molly O'Day, who as Baby, goes overboard with the histrionics by the end. It's bad enough the leads refer to each other as "Kid" and "Baby," but they also act like their namesakes. They're two insolent straw men: one an uber-nationalist who berates men to risk their lives, the other a selfish coward who skips the front-page war announcement to find the notice of his fight in the newspaper and blames his country for his boxing performance. I guess they deserved each other.