You’re watching Follow Thru. It’s from 1930. The film is older than your most buried sins, yet it still smells like freshly cut grass and the sharp, metallic tang of desperate people trying to look important.
Don’t kid yourself. This isn't a movie about sports. It’s a documentary on human vanity masquerading as a musical. Directors Lloyd Corrigan and Laurence Schwab took the absurdity of our existence and wrapped it in Technicolor-adjacent charm. People are singing while swinging sticks at a hole in the ground. It’s the perfect metaphor for the human condition: we spend our entire lives lining up the perfect shot, only to realize the game was rigged from the start.
Nancy Carroll is an open-heart surgery performed with a wide, manic grin. She dances through the frame like she’s the one who invented joy, purely so she can hold it hostage for two hours. And Charles “Buddy” Rogers? He’s the embodiment of that specific, terrifying mid-century optimism—the kind you need to survive the Great Depression without throwing yourself under a commuter train.
This is a film about people who decided that reality was too ugly to witness, so they picked up golf clubs instead. They chose the song-and-dance routine. They chose the delusion that the most important thing in the universe is getting a dimpled white ball to sit inside a plastic cup.
Is it a lie? Absolutely.
Is it the most beautiful, frantic, Technicolor lie you’ll see all year? You bet your life it is.
Go ahead. Watch it. Just don’t expect the ball to land where you aimed. Nothing ever does.
