From Those Were the Days:

1947 - After many years as a 15-minute daily serial, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, was heard for the first time as a 30-minute feature on ABC radio. Remember, if you want to grow up to be big and strong like Jack Armstrong, keep these three rules in mind: Get plenty of sleep, fresh air and exercise. Make a friend of soap and water, because dirt breeds germs -- and germs can make people sickly and weak. And for sound nourishment and keen flavor, eat a big bowlful of Wheaties, the Breakfast of Champions, with plenty of milk or cream and some type of fruit. (All together now: "Wave the flag for Hudson High, boys! Show them how we stand...")
10:56:42 AM    comment []  trackback []  

In praise of Charley Chase

“It seems criminal that a man who starred in nearly two hundred shorts and devoted his life to comedy, both as an actor and a writer-director, should be nearly forgotten today,” writes film historian Leonard Maltin about comedian Charley Chase in his book Selected Short Subjects (a.k.a. The Great Movie Shorts), and truer words were never spoken. Granted, it will probably take you a while to get to Chase when the subject of great film comedians is discussed, but his comedies were at one time (from the mid 1920s to the late 1930s) among the most popular one- and two-reelers watched by theatergoers of that generation. Maltin asserts: “There are films, and individual sequences, that rate alongside the best work [Buster] Keaton and [Charlie] Chaplin ever did.”

I first became acquainted with Charley Chase by spending an incalculable number of hours watching his Columbia shorts on television as a kid. Columbia is today best-remembered for their popular two-reelers starring the Three Stooges, but there was a time when they also produced shorts starring the likes of Andy Clyde, Hugh Herbert, El Brendel and Vera Vague, to name but a few. Columbia became a home for those comedic greats—like Keaton and Harry Langdon—who were considered “washed up” and unable to secure work elsewhere in the industry. Chase was also in that same boat; he had been dismissed by the Hal Roach Studios in 1936 (Roach was gradually phasing out his popular comedy shorts and transitioning to feature films) but was hired a year later by Columbia’s comedy shorts head Jules White to headline his own series. Chase also wrote and directed some two-reelers as well, most notably Tassels in the Air (1938) and Violent is the Word For Curly (1938)—both starring the Three Stooges.

The Columbia shorts often get a bad rap from film comedy fans—and rest assured, many of them are downright lousy—but they hold a special place in my heart for the very reason that I was introduced to the joys of comedians like Chase, Keaton and Langdon through Columbia's second-rate product. I didn’t get around to seeing many of Chase’s classic Hal Roach comedies…or Keaton’s silent masterpieces…or Langdon’s The Strong Man (1926) until much later on in life—so the fact that I became interested in their work while watching what many consider the nadir of their careers speaks volumes about their talent. (For those of you that are fans of the Columbia comedy shorts output, I cannot recommend highly enough Ed Watz and Ted Okuda’s invaluable McFarland book, The Columbia Comedy Shorts. Ed once sent me a VHS copy of Wheeler & Woolsey’s 1933 feature So This is Africa, so he’s aces in my book; he’s also written the definitive volume on this underrated comedy as well.)

This morning, I put in Kino’s The Charley Chase Collection, a newly-released DVD containing six of Chase’s silent comedy shorts—2 one-reelers and 4 two-reelers. Of the single-reel offerings, All Wet (1924) is particularly noteworthy—Chase, in his “Jimmie Jump” persona, manages to navigate his automobile into a water-filled pit with hilarious results. The short is a blueprint for one of Charley’s all-time best Hal Roach sound comedies, Fallen Arches (1933), and was later revived in the 1937 Columbia offering The Awful Goof.

But it’s the two-reel comedies that really standout in this collection; one good example being Long Fliv the King (1926), in which Charley is a condemned man who marries a foreign princess (Martha Sleeper) who’s on a 24-hour deadline to snare a husband or else forfeit the throne. Naturally, Charley gets a pardon from the governor and goes off in search of his new bride and kingdom, accompanied by flunky Max Davidson—another forgotten Roach star who also enjoyed two-reel success during the 1920s. (I saw two of his shorts—Don’t Tell Everything and Pass the Gravy—on one of AMC’s Preservation Festivals many years ago, and while they are funny, they also rely on some Jewish stereotypes that will make modern audiences wince.) You can also spot Oliver Hardy in a small supporting role; Hardy made numerous appearances alongside Chase—usually as a comic villain—before teaming up with…well, I’m sure you know the rest of that story.

There are two comedies in this DVD collection that are most assuredly worth the price of admission, the first being Crazy Like a Fox (1926). Charley falls for a girl (Sleeper again) who’s unfortunately going to be married to a man she’s never met in a wedding arranged by her father and his best friend. Charley’s in the same predicament, and—well, I won’t keep you in suspense, he’s the man to which she’s betrothed—but his plan is to extricate himself from the impending nuptials by pretending to be stark raving mad. It’s one of Chase’s funniest comedies, and the material worked so well it got an encore in 1937’s The Wrong Miss Wright, one of his better Columbia efforts.

But the piece de resistance is Mighty Like a Moose (1926), which is not only one of Chase’s best silent shorts but one of the best featuring any comedian of the silent era. Charley has teeth with which he could eat corn-on-the-cob through a picket fence; his wife (Vivien Oakland) has a snout that would make you say to Jimmy Durante: “Nose? What nose?” Behind each other’s backs, they arrange to have teeth fixed and nose bobbed, and they run into one another afterwards, flirting like mad. Charley invites the wife to a party, setting up a side-splitting situation in which both spouses are cheating on each other…with one another! The sequence in which they prepare for the party without running into or noticing one another is directed with the precision of a fine Swiss Watch, and toward the end of the short, Chase fights his “rival” in a scene inspired by Max Linder’s Be My Wife (1921). This falling-down-funny entry (as well as four of the other shorts on the DVD) was directed by Leo McCarey, who would later graduate to Oscar-winning feature films like The Awful Truth (1937) and Going My Way (1944).

To the best of my knowledge, there is only one website devoted to the underrated comic genius of Charley Chase, owned and operated by Yair Solan and definitely a must-see (Yair also has an addy for Hallmark in case you want to lobby them for a future release of Chase’s classic Roach comedies to DVD). In addition, there’s a great biography on Chase—Smile When the Raindrops Fall—written by Brian Anthony and Andy Edmonds and available through Scarecrow Press.
10:41:56 AM    comment []  trackback []