"The Grand Hooter"

This little seen film was an important one in Chase's career because it marked a return to the screen after a year-long layoff following his dismissal from the Hal Roach lot. There had only been a single appearance as host of an MGM musical short, but that was a one-shot job, with no chance of a long-term commitment. When Jules White offered Chase a contract as actor/writer/director for his Columbia shorts unit, the comic jumped at the opportunity.

In 1937, Columbia had little serious competition in the field of slapstick short subjects. And alone among active comedy producers, Jules White could claim direct lineage to the rough and tumble Keystone style pioneered by Mack Sennett and Henry Lehrman. The latter split with Sennett in 1914 and founded several comedy companies, including Fox/Sunshine Comedies where young Jack White (aka Preston Black) learned his trade. When Jack started his own comedy unit at Educational Pictures, he gave younger brother Jules a chance to direct. Spiritually, at least, Charley was returning to the Keystone lot where his career began almost 25 years earlier. Even his new director, Del Lord, was a Sennett vet.

The Grand Hooter's title is a sly pun that this reviewer must confess did not sink in until several viewings. Not only is Grand Hooter the highest office in Charley's lodge, it is a subtle allusion to MGM's 1932 Oscar-winning hit Grand Hotel. While the two-reeler does not attempt a direct parody, both plots revolve around several disparate hotel guests whose lives become comically or disastrously intertwined.

After the main credits, we are told via title card that it is 5:00 a.m. Charley pulls up in a cab after a night on the town with his fellow drunken lodge members, the Hoot Owls. ("Root-toot-toot. Root-toot-toot. We're all wise owls and we don't give a hoot! Whooo. Whooo."). When we first see Chase, the gray hair that marked his last few Roach appearances is gone, replaced with the slicked-down black hair we remember from earlier roles. He is also in a state of advanced inebriation, a condition that Chase himself had been in for much of the previous year. Noisily sneaking into his home, he wakes up his wife who we quickly learn despises the Hoot Owls. Mrs. Chase nags Charley into forgetting about his beloved Hoot Owls and taking her on a long-delayed honeymoon. ("But honey, I'm running for Grand Hooter..."). Charley reluctantly agrees and makes the necessary hotel reservations. Once at the hotel, Charley finds that not only is the desk clerk a brother Owl, but bumps into an obnoxious Hooter who asks him to retrieve some incriminating letters from a beautiful blackmailer staying at the hotel. The rest of the short is devoted to Charley's efforts to do this while avoiding the lovely blackmailer's jealous husband and the wrath of his own harridan wife.

In many ways, The Grand Hooter is a return to the plots of Chase's late silent period, which explored themes familiar to connoisseurs of French farce: marital infidelity (real or imagined), disguises and much running in-and-out of bedrooms. The gentle situational comedy and characterizations of those early masterpieces were not easily replicated at Columbia, however. Mrs. Chase, energetically played by Peggy Stratford, seems to detest her husband from the first frame and therefore has nowhere to go with the character. She exists only to pummel whoever walks through her door. The other characters are stock drunks, femme fatales and jealous husbands (Spanish, no less).

Plot loopholes abound: Charley is stumble-drunk as he tries to enter his home, but inexplicably sobers up as soon as the comic possibilities of drunkenness are exhausted. His motivation for retrieving the incriminating love letters seems to be a genuine desire to flirt with the senorita, though how he expects this ploy to succeed with his wife in the next room is a mystery. Bud Jamison is introduced midway as a house detective but never heard from again, even when people are running down hallways brandishing swords.

The short's best spots are it's gentler moments: a drunken Chase "shushing" himself using three hands and a spirited rendition of "Cielito Lindo". When he argues with his wife over a radio broadcast, the infectious martial music causes them both to march in time (a gag borrowed from Laurel and Hardy's first talkie, Unaccustomed as We Are). Charley in drag and pantless are cheap but sure-fire ways of garnering laughs. His energy and appearance belie the serious illnesses of the past decade, and he clearly takes his falls without the aid of a double. Chase's gesture of clutching his heart after the final chase is mildly unnerving if one is aware that the comedian's heart would give out in just three years.

But the meandering little film has its charms. The climax, in which all the male characters are revealed to be Hoot Owls, is satisfying and the little coda in which Charley is perched on a flagpole with his wife sawing below is cute. But Chase would go on to do much better work at Columbia, both in his own series and while directing other comedians.

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