ZaSu Pitts

A slapstick silent comedy spun from Ernest Thayer's baseball poem, with Wallace Beery as the legendary slugger Casey, here a small-town ballplayer beset by gamblers, romance, and his own mighty whiff. Ford Sterling, ZaSu Pitts, and Sterling Holloway (in his film debut) co-star. The film entered the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Sport

Erich von Stroheim's adaptation of Frank Norris's novel McTeague follows a gentle San Francisco dentist who marries the woman his best friend courted, and watches their life curdle over a lottery jackpot she hoards while he drinks. Von Stroheim shot a film that reportedly ran over nine hours; MGM cut it to roughly two, and the excised footage is believed lost. What survives is still one of the most celebrated silent films ever made, famous for its naturalistic location shooting in San Francisco and Death Valley and for ZaSu Pitts's harrowing portrait of avarice. The final crawl across the baking desert, with the two survivors handcuffed to a corpse, is one of the great endings in cinema. The film was a financial failure on release and is now regarded as a high-water mark of American silent drama. The film entered the public domain in the United States in 2020.

Drama · Silent

Constance Bennett plays Sylvia Brenner, a dowdy secretary who agrees to a marriage of convenience with her divorce-lawyer boss Gaylord Stanton (Kenneth MacKenna) so he can fend off a demanding client. She sails to Paris to wait out the arrangement and comes back transformed — which is when the fake marriage starts becoming a problem. An early RKO pre-Code romantic comedy that makes good use of Bennett's knack for playing women smarter than the plot around them. The film is in the public domain.

Comedy · Romance · Drama

ZaSu Pitts gets a rare leading role as Emma Bates, a fluttery small-town spinster who comes to the big city to see a prizefight and is promptly mistaken for a notorious gun moll. The mix-up pulls her into the boxing racket, a kidnapping, and a couple of gangland murders, and Emma turns out to be considerably sharper than the mobsters around her. Jean Yarbrough directs for Monogram, with Roger Pryor as a fast-talking reporter and Warren Hymer doing his patented dumb-mug routine. A lightweight but likeable entry in the era's run of little-old-lady comedies. The film entered the public domain after its copyright was not renewed.

Comedy · Crime

The Bashful Bachelor is a 1942 American comedy film directed by Malcolm St. Clair, produced by Jack Wm. Votion Productions and distributed by RKO Radio Pictures. The second film in the "Lum and Abner" series adapted from the hit radio program, it stars Chester Lauck and Norris Goff as Pine Ridge storekeepers Lum Edwards and Abner Peabody. Lum is finally set to marry his patient sweetheart Geraldine (ZaSu Pitts), but a staged rescue that makes him a reluctant hero — and the attentions of a grateful society girl — drives Geraldine into the arms of rival Cedric Weehunt, forcing Lum and Abner to win her back at the county horse race. The film is in the public domain through non-renewal.

Comedy · Romance