Working Around Jackie Condon’s Broken Arm

The Lucky Corner website shows that the Hal Roach Studio continued to pay Jackie Condon $40 per week throughout the summer and fall of 1922, even after he broke his arm on 8 August during the making of “The Big Show!”

That seems to confirm that Jackie did indeed work on his regular schedule after a doctor put on a splint, as the newspaper article quoted yesterday reported. (Though the studio should have been reluctant to dock the four-year-old’s pay while he recovered from an on-the-job injury.)

We can see the result of Jackie’s fracture in the Our Gang movies made in the late summer and early fall of 1922.

The freeze frame above comes from “The Cobbler,” which Tom McNamara shot in late August and early September 1922. Jackie wears long sleeves, the right one stretched tight over his splint.

Likewise, in “The Big Show!” Jackie usually has his left sleeve rolled up to his elbow but his right loose at his wrist. When he releases a bunch of animals from their cages, he works only with his left hand, the right hanging at his side.

Jackie’s injury may even have shaped the plot of “The Big Show!” as it was finally cut. According to Rob DeMoss at the Lucky Corner, filming on that short was spread out: 28 July to 15 August (a week after the injury), “added scenes” 11 to 28 September, and finally reshoots 10–11 January. That break suggests director Bob McGowan and the unit did some retooling.

The newspaper article about Jackie’s fracture and the publicity photo shared yesterday show that from the start “The Big Show!” featured the gang’s jury-rigged version of a county fair. That photo also shows Mary Kornman with the gang for the first time.

In the final film, Mary’s only scene comes in a middle section devoted to the gang and guests imitating Hollywood stars like William S. Hart and Douglas Fairbanks. She plays Mary Pickford, curly wood shavings added to her natural hair to evoke the Fauntleroy hairstyle.

Jackie doesn’t show up in that sequence at all, not even as Jackie Coogan to Andy Samuel’s Charlie Chaplin. (And ironically, back in 1921 the little tousle-headed boy had been the first face to appear in Pickford’s Little Lord Fauntleroy.)

Furthermore, Jackie doesn’t appear on any of the fair rides with the other kids in the final cut. Instead, the story is driven by the big kids excluding Jackie from their activities because he’s too little. He tries to sneak into their fair, gets chased away by tiny security guard Farina, and finally frees those animals as revenge. Those scenes were shot after his injury.

It therefore looks like Bob McGowan shot parts of “The Big Show!” with Jackie, Mary, and the gang at the fair. Then Jackie fell. As he recovered, he may have needed more rest and couldn’t do complex scenes with the whole gang—but the unit could shoot him with just Farina and the animals.

McGowan and the studio may have rebuilt their story around Jackie being left out, adding a new opening scene outside a real fair (with Joe Cobb, who didn’t join the gang until September). We don’t know whether the original story had a kid-driven plot, but that change might have been for the better.

TOMORROW: A ringside seat.