The Drop Kick
(1927)
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Richard Barthelmess, star of The Drop Kick (1927), was a very popular leading man in the late 1910s and throughout the 1920s. However, he seems a little mature at age 32 to be playing a college student in this tawdry example of a popular subgenre of the 1920s, the college picture.
Jack (Barthelmess) is captain of his college football team and favored son of a well-to-do family. Amidst the pressure of an upcoming football game and discovering his love for a young friend of the family Cecily (Barbara Kent), Jack must cope with his friend Brad’s suicide and a turgid past relationship with Brad’s vampish wife, Eunice (Dorothy Revier).
Manipulating him for purely evil reasons, Eunice leads Jack to believe that the suicide was over her infidelity with him and not (unknown to Jack) because of the scandalous embezzlement of college funds to cover her foolhardy spending.
When Jack sadly breaks off his relationship with Cecily, his mother (Hedda Hooper) vows to discover what is behind his uncharacteristic behavior, and soon discovers Eunice’s true nature and the real reason for Brad’s death.
Meanwhile, it’s the day of the big game and Jack is having loads of trouble concentrating on the game. But one drop kick later and a seemingly hollow victory turns to joy as Jack learns the truth from his mother. Relieved, he rushes to reunite with Cecily.
The Eunice situation remains unresolved, and the game feels tacked onto an otherwise run-of-the-mill romancer, but — what the hey — it’s a college picture!
The Drop Kick is notable as the film debut of John Wayne as a unidentifiable football player and as a quickly-passing crowd extra. — Carl Bennett
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 2004 Nostalgia Family Video edition
The Drop Kick (1927), sepia-toned black & white, 69 minutes, not rated.
Nostalgia Family Video, 1326D, UPC 6-44827-39982-6.
Full-frame 4:3 NTSC, one single-sided, single-layered DVD-R disc, Region 0, ? Mbps average video bit rate, ? kbps audio bit rate, Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo sound, English language intertitles, no foreign language subtitles, chapter stops, keep case, $19.99.
DVD release date: 2004.
Country of origin: USA
Ratings (1-10): video: 5 / audio: 5 / additional content: 4 / overall: 5.
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 We are generally pleased with this DVD-R product from a long-established public domain home video company. While the products from small video companies rarely approach those of major companies, these companies concentrate on releasing films that are ignored by national companies (mostly for reasons of economies of scale — not enough demand to warrant a release of thousands of copies). One way to meet the slim demand for particular silent era titles is for small companies to duplicate them ‘on demand’ on VHS videotape or DVD-R discs at the time of order.
The full-frame sepia-toned video transfer has been made from a very-good 16mm reduction print, which is soft of image detail but generally watchable with its OK range of graytones. Highlights are a little blasted out and shadows are a little dark, there is light speckling, some splices and a few scratches, but it is far from being as bad as other 16mm prints we have viewed. As is the case with many 16mm prints, the picture is slightly cropped on all sides and the film’s intertitles come very close to the frame edges. A full-frame transfer doesn’t compensate for the amount of the picture image that is cropped on most televisions, the area around all four sides that is known as overscan, like a windowboxed transfer (which slightly shrinks the picture into the center of the screen) can. In this edition, the intertitles will at times be cropped on both sides on most televisions to the point that intertitles will be a challenge to read.
Nostalgia Family Video has produced a new music score for this release (when most other small companies utilize a compilation of public domain music) that is performed on synthesizers and, while the synthetic sounds aren’t always pleasing, it does the job of accompanying the film.
The packaging of this title are of higher quality than is usual for public domain companies. The cover insert, disc label and menus (which adapt the original poster artwork) show a sense of design which adds to the professional feel of the product.
Allowing for the soft-detail shortcomings of the 16mm print, we still recommend this title and look forward to future NFV releases of silent era films on DVD home video.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R is available directly from Nostalgia Family Video.
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