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By most accounts, one of the worst silent films ever made. It starred Ed Wynn and he tried to buy back the print/s as well as bad mouthed the film so Paramount wouldn't release it. Does this film survive?

An IMDb review by F.G. MacIntyre lends the assumption he's seen or saw the film(and of course no one else has).

Chester Conklin on the right in this photo from Rubber Heels (1927)

No prints are known to survive. http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.m ... fault.html

From the Photoplay blurb:

One gorgeous stunt filmed at Niagara Falls and that's it. The rest just proves that Ed Wynn is no screen comic.

Ouch...

--Peter

Still playing in 1929

Cairns Post Monday 27 May 1929, page 3

ENTERTAINMENTS
All - Paramount Programme.
Menjou in "His Private Life" and Chester Conklin in "Rubber Heels."

To-ight the Palace management will present a complete programme, con-
sisting of two big features, 2-part comedy with Australian and American
gazettes. Attraction No. 1 is "His Private Life," in which debonair Adolphe
Menjoú plays lead, opposite his own wife, Kathryn Carver. A terrific fel-
low, this Adolphe, he's always mixed up with scores of women. In-
cidently, there is the other woman's husband, but that is another
side of the story. In feature No. 2 Ed. Wynn and Chester Conklin are
starred in "Rubber Heels," the amusing tale of Homer Thrush. Homer
secures a position in Tennyson Hawk's "detective agency." Then, the
fun-begins. Attraction No. 3 is a 2-part Paramount comedy '' "Hot Spark,"
while the fourth item is the Australian and American gazettes. The musical
programme is by the full Palace orchestra which ' is capably conducted
by Mrs. S. Cleall. The box plan closes at 4 o'clock this afternoon.

Instead of King Kong remakes, it'd be fun if Peter Jackson did a documentary on
the never-returned "lost films" that may still survive in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand,
or if Mr. Cameron's next true-life undersea adventure turned out to be a needle in haystack search for
the countless reels allegedly dumped off-shore in the 1920s and 1930s.

buckley wrote:Just to clear matters, Tasmania(formerly Van Dieman's Land) is not a country but a state of Australia that is smaller than Madagascar, by all accounts. Actress Merle Oberon was not born there either and Mr Flynn's birth there is also doubtful.

JFK wrote:[Instead of King Kong remakes, it'd be fun if Peter Jackson did a documentary on
the never-returned "lost films" that may still survive in Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand,
or if Mr. Cameron's next true-life undersea adventure turned out to be a needle in haystack search for
the countless reels allegedly dumped off-shore in the 1920s and 1930s.[

Jackson already did this. It's called "Forgotten Silver".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Silver

The review of RUBBER HEELS in Liberty (August 20, 1927) isn't complementary either, but it's interesting for other reasons:

FUNNY BONERS
Why Famous Stage Comedians Flop on the Screen

An article by Frederick James Smith

Ed Wynn, the musical-comedy star, recently made an excursion into motion pictures. He filmed RUBBER HEELS for Paramount Pictures -- and then retired for a rest.

Wynn is not the first footlight comedian to dive in and out of the films. Raymond Hitchcock was one of the first to try it, back in the old Keystone days. Before that he did a comedy for the Lubin company, which made burlesques in Philadelphia. Hitchcock was a flop. He is still dabbling in pictures now and then. Recently he played a circus mountebank in THE MONKEY TALKS.

Fred Stone tried three comedies with the Famous Players-Lasky corporation, and established a high-water mark in failures. He made two more comedies, and these also failed. Stone's buffoonery simply did not photograph.

The most recent instance of an in-again-out-again comedian is Eddie Cantor. Cantor made three comedies for Famous Players, the last of which, THE GIRL FRIEND, has not yet been released. Then he announced his definite return to the footlights. He will star for Flo Ziegfeld, Jr.

Will Rogers was more successful, although he has never had the crowds storming at the box-office windows. The ex-Oklahoma cowboy made a number of pictures for Goldwyn, Famous Players, Pathé, and other companies. He has had at least three screen classics -- JUBILO, ONE GLORIOUS DAY, and the two-reel satire, TWO WAGONS, BOTH COVERED -- to his credit. Mr. Rogers is going to try the films again shortly, devoting his spare time to the job of mayor of Beverly Hills.

W. C. Fields tried the pictures several times, finally scoring a hit in D. W. Griffith's SALLY OF THE SAWDUST; and he is now co-starring for Famous with Chester Conklin. His next few comedies will buy him either a Hollywood bungelow or a return ticket to Broadway. Leon Errol, with his fadeaway leg, was still another film failure.

Why do so many Broadway comedians flop on the screen? Because too much is expected of them at the start, and because they have none of the resources of a trained film maker. Harold Lloyd and others maintain their batteries of gag men. They take months developing their comedies, timing their laughs, putting in and taking out episodes. The footlight comedians are rushed through their repertoire of stage tricks -- and fail.

Ed Wynn did not even wait for the public reception of RUBBER HEELS. He returned to the New York stage voluntarily.

RUBBER HEELS is a comedy of a boob detective. Wynn is Homer Thrush, the man of many disguises. Chester Conklin, incidentally, is the master mind of the underworld. One of the comic thrills comes when Wynn is floated out to the crest of Niagara Falls on a chest. Wynn actually did the stunt, after the double looked at the slender cable designed to hold the chest from bobbing over the cataract, and decided to make no further sacrifices for art.

Wynn tried RUBBER HEELS to get a rest from the rigors of touring with a musical revue.

He was born in Philadelphia in 1886. His father ran a ladies' millinery establishment. You can trace the millinery influence in the way Wynn, for years, has extracted comedy from trick hats -- they also figure in RUBBER HEELS.

The comedian did not want to be a ladies' milliner. So he ran away and went on the stage. He was hissed off when he did his first act, a near-comic monologue. Wynn played in vaudeville and then made his musical-comedy debut in The Deacon and the Lady. Engagements in the Follies and at the New York Winter Garden followed.

He was just launching into footlight stardom when the actors' strike of 1920 occurred. Wynn, at the moment the highest salaried actor on Broadway, joined the strike and became the leader of the insurgents. He made furious speeches up and down Broadway, to the delight of large crowds.

With the strike won, Wynn found himself unpopular with the defeated producers and so became his own producer. His first revue starring himself was The Ed Wynn Carnival. The Perfect Fool and The Grab-Bag followed.

Wynn writes lyrics and music of songs; he is the author of several humorous books; and he does a newspaper syndicate feature. In private life he is the husband of Frank Keenan's daughter, and an inhabitant of that famous Long Island town of actor folk, Great Neck.

RUBBER HEELS? A fairly entertaining satire â la Mack Sennett, but minus the old Sennett tang. Only Sennett could laugh at life in just the right key.

A few footnotes: Although it was much ballyhooed at the time, the cameras probably never turned on Eddie Cantor's third production for Paramount, THE GIRL FRIEND. Which is a shame, because several items from Variety and Exhibitor's Herald say that the hit Rodgers and Hart musical would be adapted for the screen by Jules Furthmann and Keene Thompson, with "comedy construction" by Al Boasberg (his first job under his new Paramount contract). Gregory La Cava was slated to direct, and one item broadly hinted that Cantor would have been reunited with his KID BOOTS co-star, Clara Bow.

Cantor often spoke disparagingly of his second picture, SPECIAL DELIVERY, and remarked in his autobiography, My Life Is In Your Hands: "[T]he picture was quite a hit in Australia. It was the farthest place they could send it to." That line was deleted before the book was published.

Just to clear matters, Tasmania(formerly Van Dieman's Land) is not a country but a state of Australia that is smaller than Madagascar, by all accounts. Actress Merle Oberon was not born there either and Mr Flynn's birth there is also doubtful.