The Good Bad Boy

Joe Butterworth has a reputation as a bad boy, but he's simply the thoughtless kind of youngster we all know. His father, Forrest Robinson, is an unsuccessful inventor; his mother, Lucy Beaumont, has to take in washing. Joe spends most of his time with his dog Brownie, but he's joined the scout troop and is the bugler.

Robinson's latest invention, a patent fire extinguisher, shows promise. However the lawyer he's entrusted with the paperwork is not an honest man, and is colluding with an executive from a manufacturing company to steal the device and sell it to the company for $100,000. When his mother is in the hospital, and his father in jail on trumped-up charges, the executive steals the working model, and it's up to Joe to fix the problem.

It's a pleasant although undistinguished short kid's movie. Director Eddie Cline puts ina couple of good comedy sequences, but the writing is, by and large, uninspiring. The best remembered performer in it is Brownie. He was Chaplin's co-star in A DOG'S LIFE. For half a decade he appeared in shorts that starred or featured him, sometimes as 'Brownie the Wonder Dog.' His name disappeared from movie credits after 1925. The rest, as it so often is with silent performers, is silence.