4/5 The Founding Father of Situation Comedy
  by Randy E. Halford (Boise, ID)
Like many early comedy artists, the name Charley Chase seems only of interest to film buffs & scholars. One reason his name may not be well-remembered is that he tried--and failed--to transition to feature-length films, working mainly in short subjects. With the first volume (of, hopefully, several more) of Chase's silent comedy work at the Hal Roach studios, he'll finally get his due.
Slender, dapper and handsome, with great comic timing & reactions, Chase practically invented what is known today as "situation comedy" on T.V. Chase liked to take a premise--a situation that could very well happen to anyone--and expand it; make it overblown & farcical. His collaborations with the equally-imaginative director Leo McCarey (the man responsible for teaming Laurel & Hardy) was a momentous occasion.
My favorites from these six shorts? "Mighty Like A Moose" is irresistably charming, foreshadowing today's trends in plastic surgery. "Crazy Like A Fox" is daffy fun as Chase gets to cut loose here, using insane behavior to get the girl. But the others show flashes of comic brilliance: "All Wet" has Chase maneuvering his car into a ridiculously deep & wide puddle...then making repairs underwater! "Long Fliv The King" makes use of the "fish-out-of-water" plot device by having death-row inmate Chase being rescued from the gallows to rule a small country. Look for a then-stock player Oliver Hardy in a supporting role as a servant. "April Fool" is a brief short in which Chase--calling himself Jimmie Jump--takes the fad of playing pranks to hilarious heights.
It's a shame that Mr. Chase died too young in 1940, from a heart attack attributed to heavy drinking. What he created with these shorts helped push the envelope of comedy invention to the next level.


4/5 Some great stuff
  by Anyechka (Rensselaer, NY United States)
Though he was the biggest comedian working in short subjects in the mid- and late Twenties, unfortunately Charley Chase is largely forgotten today. Happily, however, as more of his work becomes available on DVD and released to the public, it seems as though more and more fans of vintage comedy are rediscovering just how talented and funny he truly was, right up there with the likes of Keaton, Chaplin, Lloyd, and Linder. This disc brings together six of his shorts, four two-reelers and two one-reelers.

'Mum's the Word' (1926) was previously released on Vol. 9 of 'The Lost Films of Laurel and Hardy.' Charley plays a young man who is coming home from school to visit his mother, who has just remarried. On the train home, he meets a young lady whom he, of course, falls in love with. It turns out that she's travelling to the same house he is, where she works as a maid, and that once home, he must pretend to be a new butler, for his mother hasn't yet told her new husband the rather important fact that she has a grown son. It also comes out that the new maid isn't being totally honest about her true identity either.

'Long Fliv the King' (1926) starts out with the not-so-original plot device of a young woman, Helga, having to marry by a certain date and time, but in this case she's not being rushed to marriage because she's got money coming to her--she's got a royal crown coming to her. She settles on Charley, who is in prison and scheduled to die soon. What the new queen didn't count on was that just after they were married and she left for her kingdom, Charley would be sprung from prison and cleared of the false charges against him. He trails her to her kingdom with his new friend/lackey Warfield, played by the wonderful Max Davidson, who is even more forgotten than Charley today. His own films aren't shown too often because of modern-day concerns and sensitivities towards the rather stereotyped Jewish characters he often was stuck playing, but in films such as this (though it does contain a few somewhat cringe-worthy moments), he was more or less allowed to just be himself and to be funny that way. Of course, complications arise when Charley arrives in Thermosa. Many people at court don't want some outsider on the throne, and try to overthrow him. Oliver Hardy also plays a small role in this one.

'April Fool' (1924) is from Charley's days playing a character called Jimmie Jump. Being a one-reeler, the plot is fairly simple and straightforward, people at his newspaper office playing tricks on one another all day, with his sweetheart, the boss's daughter, eventually getting in on the fun too.

'Mighty Like a Moose' (1926) was previously released on Vol. 9 of 'The Lost Films of L&H.' Charley, Mr. Moose, has horrible teeth, and his wife has a rather unfortunate nose. Unbeknownest to the other, they each get surgery, and are so unrecognisable to one another afterwards that they make a date to go to a party being thrown by their doctor. Since they both think they're cheating on the other spouse, a lot of comedy ensues as they're each getting ready for the date. Things get even more sticky when a picture of the two of them shows up on the front page of the paper after the party was busted for having alcohol.

'Crazy Like a Fox' (1926) was previously released on Vol. 6 of 'The Lost Films of L&H,' and co-stars Oliver Hardy in a minor role. Charley is very unhappy because he's being forced to marry a woman he doesn't know, and even more so after meeting and falling in love (or at least lust) at first sight with a young woman he meets at the depot. She too is being forced to marry against her will, but what neither of them know is that Charley is the man she's been matched with. Determined to avoid this marriage, Charley decides to pretend to be absolutely crazy when he arrives at the young woman's mansion. His riotous act may end up working a little too well, however.

'All Wet' (1924) is another Jimmie Jump comedy. Jimmie, who is staying at a boarding house, gets an important telegram telling him to be at the train station by 2:30 to pick up a litter of English Pitbull puppies. He happily dashes off to fulfill what he thinks will be a routine errand, but meets with nothing but car (and other) trouble along the way. Though he was really good in these one-reelers, he was just too funny and talented to be served well in such a short timeframe. He needed that extra reel to continue building up the storyline and his character.

Overall, this is a solid enough introduction to Charley's work for a new fan, though the one-reelers really aren't at the same mature polished level as the later four shorts. It's also unfortunate that fully one-half of this collection was previously released; it's not fair to fans to be asked to buy that much duplicate material just to see a few new shorts. Having three repeats from previous collections might not be that bad had there been more than just six shorts here, but since there are only six, it seems like it would have made more sense for there to be more newly-released material, no matter how great the three repeats are.

5/5 Mine Played Fine
  by Wayne A. (Belfast, Northern Ireland)
Look right below me. Since when did this stop being a review symposium and start being the Complaints Department at Macey's? I'm here for the reviews, not for some dopey quality-control issue that should be brought up with the manufacturer and one that the manufacturer and distributer would certainly fix pronto. I hated Don Quixote because of a bad binding? I honestly expect more sense from a Top 500 reviewer. I just came from a review of a Hammer Film (The Devil Rides Out) where some loon from Italy goes on and on about all the DVDs that Amazon sends her are "100% Damaged" including the replacements!!! She's ordering DVDs from the US and she lives in Italy?! A Region Coding problem perhaps? Please visit the review and hit inappropriate, then go to her other reviews and do the same (They all complain about "100% Damaged" DVDs!!). Lets clear out the deadwood.

Anyway, I highly recommend this collection. Chase is a real surprise if you've been stuck with the usuals for silent comedy--his work almost seems like fun rips on Silents that would've been made in the Fifties for, say, "Singin' in the Rain." He especially had an acute eye for an outrageous site gag that somehow made sense. In one film (name forgotten) he's getting out of his car with his golf clubs and a women whizzes by him and nearly misses him. The golf clubs fly way too far up in the air and scatter ridiculously. It's a subtle bit of extra oomph that makes his work so enjoyable.

Thanks Kino--great job!!

2/5 Defective dvd don't buy
  by Jmark2001 (Florida)
This dvd will only play the first short. There are no links to get to the other movies. The main menu only goes to one movie.

3/5 Silent Screwball Comedy
  by Robert Morris (San Francisco)
In the 1930s, most of the great US directors (Hawks, Hitchcock, Sturgess, Capra, Wilder) experimented with the "screwball comedy" genre. Although hard to define, a screwball comedy usually consisted of a witty middle class couple falling in and out of love and/or marriage, a series of madcap adventures, and witty dialog, often with sexual innuendo. Leo McCarey, who wrote and directed for Hal Roach, also made sound films in this genre (The Awful Truth).

This collection represents Leo McCarey's work with Charlie Chase for Hal Roach between 1924 and 1926. Charlie Chase invites more comparisons with the male leads in Screwball comedies (especially Robert Montgomery and Joel McCray) than with the great "clowns" like Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton. Chase lacked the physical grace and the ability to create memorable visual humor of the big 3. Instead his humor tended to emerge from being thrown into and out of outrageous, awkward or embarassing situations, typically but not always involving a romantic partner. In "Mighty Like a Moose", both he and his wife try to surprise one another with changes in their facial appearance, then become attracted to each other in their "new look", without knowing their true identity. In "Long Fliv the King", Chase, a condemned criminal, marries a princess of a foreign country out of convenience, only to be pardoned, and thus faced with being King of his inherited land. Sometimes the situations work, but more often they are too outrageous to draw the viewer into the mayhem. Also, the witty dialog of the sound screwball comedies sometimes made up for the silly premises of the plot (think of "Bringing Up Baby"), but in the silent version, of course, such dialog was not possible. So these films, although interesting and mildly amusing at times, may be disappointing to many viewers. One gets the overall sense here that Roach and McCarey were part of an experimental lab for developing more sophisticated alternatives to the "slapstick" genre (so the title of the series "Slapstick symposium" is a little misleading). Like all lab experiments, sometimes they work, sometimes not.

Another interesting aspect of these, and other silent movies, is how often their gags were reused later on. In "Mum's the Word", Charlie and his step-dad perform a sight gag with a window shade that resembles the famous pantomime between Chico and Groucho in "Duck Soup" (also directed by McCarey). Also, there is the "woman making like a chair" scene that was repeated in Laurel and Hardy's sound feature "Blockheads".

In general, it would help to be both a fan of the screwball genre, as well as of the Hal Roach factory, to enjoy this collection.