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Cult Review
Senior Film Conservator
Fred Hibbard’s Golfing is a riptide of silk-stocking anarchy, a two-reeler that detonates the parlor-room propriety of 1920 like a mashie-niblick swung through stained glass. What begins as polite indoor instruction mutates—via centrifugal force—into a cubist catastrophe: rugs become sand traps, chandeliers morph into swaying palm trees of crystal, and the family’s dignity is sliced into a confetti of plaster dust and horsehair stuffing.
The film’s kinetic grammar predates the term “screwball,” yet it pulses with the same subversive libido that Howard Hawks would bottle a decade later. Hibbard’s camera, tethered to the floor but drunk on diagonal compositions, pans like a spectator whose neck keeps getting jabbed by a rogue nine-iron. Every stroke is a Big Bang: the instructor’s backswing stretches time into taffy, the down-swing snaps it, and the impact sprays matter across the frame with ballistic glee. The result is a visual haiku on the theme of entropy—white ball against burgundy wallpaper, a comet of order carving chaos through Victorian décor.
Our unnamed golf pro arrives like a carnival barker, mustache waxed into exclamation points, shoes clicking like castanets on parquet. He is both Prospero and tempest, brandishing a club like a wand that conjures ruin. Watch how he measures the parlor: eyes narrowed, tongue clicking the arithmetic of angles—here a nine-iron, there a niblick, the chaise lounge a dog-leg left. His authority is so total that even the shadow of his cap seems to boss the wallpaper into submission.
Yet beneath the buffoonery lurks the tragic silhouette of the post-WWI male tutor: a man whose expertise is obsolete the moment it leaves his lips, whose rituals of sport are futile incantations against a world that has already outgrown him. When he intones, “Keep your head down, old boy,” the words echo like trench counsel—keep your head down, or lose it. The comedy is laced with cordite.
At the vortex stands Baby Peggy, four years old and already a veteran of audience hearts. Peggy doesn’t act; she detonates. Her face is a flicker-book of adult emotions—calculation, schadenfreude, pity—compressed into 24 frames per second. When she tees up a button on the carpet, she squints with the cold appraisal of a riverboat gambler, then wallops it straight into the maid’s posterior. The moment is pure id, a child’s revenge on the adult world that keeps lifting her up to kiss her cheek.
Note the economy of gesture: a tilt of her bobbed hair equals conspiracy; a twitch of her pinafore hem forecasts calamity. She is the film’s moral gyroscope—when the chaos peaks, her giggle rights the universe. Critics often cite Winning Grandma or Her Purchase Price as the apex of Peggy’s silent-era reign, but Golfing distills her essence into a single, riotous putt that rolls across the screen like a manifesto.
If Peggy is chaos theory, Brownie is its fuzzy vector. A scruffy terrier with the soul of a cinematographer, he frames scenes by sitting where the lens should be, tail wagging like a metronome counting down to slapstick apocalypse. He trots off with the ball in his maw, initiating a chase that spirals from parlor to pantry to porch, a spiral staircase of escalating pratfalls. His bark is punctuation, his sniff a plot twist. When he finally drops the ball onto the green, it lands with the divine thunk of deus ex machina.
Silent-era dogs often served as mere novelty—see Bjørnetæmmeren for proof—but Brownie is narrative glue, the connective tissue between human folly and animal instinct. Watch how he side-eyes the instructor: a glance that says, you call that a swing? In that moment, dog becomes critic, audience surrogate, and moral arbiter.
The film’s hinge—its cut from indoor carnage to outdoor calm—plays like a resurrection. The camera opens on morning mist curling above the fairway, a haiku of turf and sky. Suddenly the earlier chaos feels prelapsarian; the greens, clipped to mathematical precision, are a rebuke to the shredded settee back home. Yet Hibbard refuses pastoral ease: clouds skid across the sky like nervous time-lapse, and the instructor’s shadow stretches across the tee like a sundial counting down to fresh disaster.
Out here, strokes become stanzas. A long shot holds as Peggy lines up her putt: the ball, the hole, and the horizon form a trinity of want. She taps; the ball rolls across the grass like a bead of mercury, disappearing with a clink that echoes louder than any explosion in the parlor. The moment is Eisensteinian—montage of expectation, release, and metaphysical shrug. You realize the indoor havoc was mere rehearsal; the real crucible is this manicured void where ambition meets horizon.
Listen—yes, listen—to the silence. The clatter of a shattered vase is so vivid you swear you hear it. The rustle of Brownie’s fur against gabardine trousers becomes a susurrus, a promise of velocity. Hibbard manipulates absence; he makes the intertitle cards stutter like skipped heartbeats. When the instructor yells “Fore!” the word appears onscreen in oversized, jittery font, then dissolves into a flock of black birds that scatter across the iris-out. The effect is synesthetic: text becomes noise, noise becomes image.
Place Golfing beside The Wallop or Flirting with Fate and you’ll see a shared chromosomal strand: the domestic sphere as playground, the bourgeois drawing-room as kill-zone. Yet Hibbard’s film is leaner, meaner, more haiku than epic. Where A Gentleman of Quality leans on melodrama to sandpaper class tension, Golfing simply lets a golf ball do the talking—ricocheting off silver frames, toppling busts of dead ancestors, and rewriting bloodlines in chalk strokes on the floor.
Notice the mother: corseted, eyebrows plucked into permanent surprise, forever clutching a lace hanky as though it might staunch the haemorrhage of decorum. Her screams crescendo in intertitles shaped like lightning bolts. Yet in the final fairway shot, she squares her shoulders, accepts a club, and swings. The arc is hesitant, but the ball dribbles forward—an act of micro-rebellion. In that dribble lies the entire suffragette subtext: the right to a lousy swing, staked out on public grass.
Golf, the Scottish import, arrives in American parlors like a missionary of empire. The instructor proselytizes with religious fervor, mapping Scottish bunkers onto American domesticity. When the ball finally soars over the links, it traces the arc of Manifest Destiny—white sphere against blue sky, colonizing the horizon. Yet Hibbard undercuts the myth: the ball slices, hooks, dives into gopher holes, and finally succumbs to Peggy’s slap-dash putt. Empire, the film giggles, is just another divot waiting to be replaced.
Restoration prints from the Library of Congress reveal textures lost for decades: the herringbone of the instructor’s tweed, the opalescent shimmer of Peggy’s pinafore, the canine constellation of freckles on Brownie’s snout. Digitized at 4K, the film’s grain now pulses like living tissue. When the ball drops into the final hole, the ripples in the cup are topographies of moon craters—proof that comedy, at 18 frames per second, can still birth galaxies.
Golfing ends on an iris-in, the black circle closing around Peggy’s triumphant grin as if the universe itself is giving her a hug. You exit with the sense that sport, family, and cinema are all improvisational games—rules cribbed on the fly, victory redefined as shared laughter. The film is a 20-minute manifesto on the art of missing: miss the vase, miss the fairway, miss the point—until, by missing, you hit something truer. A century later, when CGI comedies hurl galaxies at us, Hibbard’s turf-bound miniatures feel radical: proof that a dimpled ball, a dog’s tail, and a child’s guile can still tilt the axis of the world.
IMDb —
1923
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