Shore Leave

Richard Barthelmess plays "Bilge" Smith, a hard-fisted merchant sailor who puts into a sleepy New England port and falls for Connie Martin (Dorothy Mackaill), the town dressmaker, in this silent adaptation of Hubert Osborne's 1922 Broadway play. Directed by John S. Robertson for Barthelmess's own Inspiration Pictures, it mixes roughhouse comedy — including a memorably chaotic shipboard brawl — with a tender romance about two lonely people from very different worlds. The story proved durable: RKO remade it a decade later as the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet (1936). As a work published before 1930, it is in the public domain in the United States.