Bone Crushers

MGM presents A Sports Champion Picture. Paul Gerard Smith does the old style sports announcer narration. They go to Santa Monica, California and visit muscle beach. They have a bunch of no-name wrestlers doing some old style wrestling moves. There is some slow motion footage of a two-person demonstration. Then two other guys do it in front of a small crowd. This is definitely before the modern day fighting techniques. I doubt that they are faking everything, but there is some setting up for the filmmaker. This could be good for a wrestling aficionado, but for everybody else, it is a little campy.

This MGM short offers the audience a bit of cheesecake with pictures of well-developed men on Santa Monica Beach and in the wrestling ring in the early 1930s.

It has some technical interest with its use of high-speed photography as a couple of men grapple in the ring, but unless one of those two subjects is your dish there isn't much more to it. It's basically a silent movie with constant narration by Paul Girard Smith. Smith was a writer, credited with three of Ziegfeld's annual Follies, the Broadway version of FUNNY FACE and several screenplays, including Buster Keaton's THE GENERAL. His high-speed narration was the sort one might have heard on a radio version of a wrestling match, but it lacks the snarky fun of Pete Smith.