W. C. Fields trashes the real-life Palm Beach estate of Edward Stotesbury in It’s the Old Army Game. Dazzy Vance was not far away.

In 1926 W. C. Fields filmed It’s the Old Army Game. The silent—minus shell-game patter (if only via intertitles)—movie has something to do with Florida real-estate scams, including elements Fields would re-create in his masterful It’s a Gift. But Army Game is best remembered for showcasing the complex and alluring Midwesterner Louise Brooks before she rocketed to international stardom, under G. W. Pabst, in the Frank Wedekind-inspired Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora). Brooks was married to Edward Sutherland round the time of the Fields movie. Sutherland was a handsome director and man’s man who took to Fields like the proverbial duck to water (or gin to tonic).

Some of the film was shot in Ocala, near the home of Dazzy Vance, another legendary Midwesterner, who would be buried in nearby Homosassa (a euphonious appellation if ever there was) Springs, and also took to Fields like…you know. The actor and the ballplayer were friends, undoubtedly via Brooklyn (though Vance had a cup of coffee with the Yankees, then in Manhattan, during the 1915 season), which abuts Queens County. The comedian starred for Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. also commencing in 1915. When not making movies (His Lordship’s Dilemma is lost) that year through the 1920s, Fields was commuting from Broadway to Queens: Bayside and Great Neck (Russell Gardens). By 1926, Vance would long be striking out batters at a record clip for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Indeed, the unusual Vance—who but for arm-troubles didn’t begin his MLB career in earnest till he was thirty-one—would lead the N.L. in whiffs for seven consecutive seasons. He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame seventy years ago in 1955, and died six years later, February 16, 1961, aetat. sixty-nine.

Indeed, the unusual Fields stars in several films (Gift, So’s Your Old Man [also 1926], and The Bank Dick) that have been preserved by the National Film Registry—a hall of fame of sorts. He died on Christmas, 15 years before Vance, at sixty-six. (Fields by the way claimed to have beaten off an alligator in the Everglades while getting a cool drink for Linelle Blackburn. See Simon Louvish’s Man on the Flying Trapeze for a lot more that I [Evander] have cultivated, as well as Louise Brooks’s classic Lulu in Hollywood. On July 4, 2018, round the Blu-ray release of Army Game, John Bengtson with Thomas Gladysz posted many additional details of its setting, stars, and plot.)