The Varmint

The Varmint is a lost 1917 American comedy silent film directed by William Desmond Taylor, written by Gardner Hunting and Owen Johnson, and starring Jack Pickford, Louise Huff, Theodore Roberts, Henry Malvern, Ben Suslow and Milton Schumann. It was released on August 5, 1917, by Paramount Pictures.

Plot
John Humperdinck Stover, (Jack Pickford) otherwise known as "The Varmint" or "Dink" was expelled from a co-educational boarding school, and was sent to Lawrenceville Academy, a school for boys, famous for its football teams. He confides to a silent individual riding on the coach to the school, on the subject of his past career and the reason why he was expelled from his previous school, a man "Dink" takes to be a traveling salesman and later finds out is the Latin professor, known as the "Roman" (Theodore Roberts).

Confidently boasting that "in a week he'd have 'em feeding out of his hands", Dink arrives at the school. Little by little he succeeded in making himself the most thoroughly disliked person on the Campus, especially when he committed the crime of crimes, and asked, for a second helping of prunes at table.

Dink has a variety of experiences in his first school year. He becomes an easy mark for the schoolboy salesmanship of Doc MacNooder (Maxfield Stanley) and the Tennessee Shad (Robert Gordon) and buys every line of junk those enterprising youths offer him for sale. He runs away from a licking when he loses the house baseball game, which further committed him to the depths of social ostracism. He neglects his studies, makes the football team, and has to pass an exam before he can play. He passed on a blank paper handed in to the Roman, wins the football game, and makes love to the Roman's daughter Laura (Louise Huff).