Off the Deck

Sailor-Suited Billy Dooley is on shore leave, so he switches to civvies. Along the way, he has a stolen necklace stuck in a pocket, goes to tea with Vera Steadman and has the thief and his girlfriend try to recover the necklace.

This is one of the co-branded short comedies that the Christie brothers produced for Paramount in the waning days of silent shorts. Most fans of silent comedy know of independent producers Hal Roach and Mack Sennett. The Christies were another successful organization until the decline of short subjects in the 1930s. In the 1920s they specialized in high-speed slapstick, in which the plot was merely a way of getting from one gag to the next as quickly as possible. For this series, they used stage dancer Billy Dooley, who possessed the agility and face-making abilities he had developed. The result, like this one, was a good, unmemorable comedy.