Social Error

David Sharpe gets tossed out of college and bailed out of jail for being a jerk. He reads of a threat to kidnap Gertrude Messinger because her father has a valuable gem collection. Spotting Miss Messinger being helped into a car by a bodyguard to take her home, he decides she is being kidnapped. With the unable assistance of Fred 'Snowflake' Toones, he rescues her from her father. No one knows that the jewels have already been stolen. With the police on their trail, the crooks give the packed loot to Toones.

Sharpe is an agile young man, but I wonder if Miss Messinger stopped to think that the gags had been much better run when she had been performing in the Century kiddie movies a dozen years earlier. There is an excessive amount of cutting that robs the gags of any real force, and the pacing is erratic. In one of the worst rendered gags, Sharpe is clinging to a flagpole in a timeworn thrill comedy moment, but the shots are framed so tightly he might as well be in the studio. The street below is shown in alternating cuts.

Young adults falling in love is a fine plot for a comedy, and Sharpe might have made some good comedies, if he hadn't been writing them himself and letting the mediocre western director Harry L. Fraser wield the megaphone. Fraser's westerns were slow and padded. This one is just slow and inept.