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5.9/10
Senior Film Conservator
A definitive 5.9/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. Dizzy & Daffy remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
If you have twenty minutes to spare and a weird obsession with 1930s sports history, Dizzy & Daffy is a pretty fun little relic. Anyone else is probably going to find this incredibly boring and outdated, though. ⚾
It is basically a showcase for the real-life Dean brothers, wrapped up in some very silly, low-budget slapstick. The plot follows a half-blind minor league pitcher who somehow crosses paths with the legendary pitchers.
Honestly, the real reason I watched this was for Shemp Howard. He plays a coach, and even when the script is totally flat, his face is always doing maximum work to get a laugh.
There is a gag where a guy gets hit with a baseball and his eyes go completely crossed. It is the kind of simple, cheap joke they loved back then, but it still made me chuckle a bit.
Dizzy and Daffy Dean are... well, they are definitely athletes and not actors. You can almost see them staring at cue cards just off-screen, their voices completely flat like they are reading a grocery list.
But there is a strange charm to how stiff they are. It reminds me of the weirdly stiff acting in other early talkies, like The Old Homestead, where everyone just yells their lines at the microphone.
The baseball scenes looks like they were shot in a random park with maybe ten extras standing around. The crowd noises are clearly piped in later, and they do not match what is happening on screen at all.
Still, if you like seeing old-school athletes pretend they can act, this is a neat little time capsule. Just do not expect anything close to high art.