Chase With Heart

Despite that well-known theatrical adage "never act with children", many silent film comedians got a good deal of comic mileage out of their on-screen partnerships with kids. Harold Lloyd produced two notable shorts which featured children: From Hand to Mouth, in which he teams up with Peggy Cartwright, and Get Out and Get Under, which features Ernie "Sunshine Sammy" Morrison. Buster Keaton played opposite two young boys in one of his best shorts, The Boat. And then, of course, there's Charlie Chaplin, whose first feature film, The Kid, paired the comedian with an up-and-coming Jackie Coogan. Charley Chase can also be added onto the list of comedians who feature children in their films. Two of Chase's silent comedies immediately come to mind: his last, Movie Night (1929), with the memorable Edith Fellows playing his perennially hiccupping daughter, and No Father to Guide Him (1925), an earlier, and in many ways superior, two-reeler.

In this short, Chase plays a father who dearly wishes to spend time with his son after a separation from his wife (Katherine Grant) gives her legal custody. Josephine Crowell plays the crabby mother-in-law who forbids any reconciliation between husband and wife and any association between father and son. Charley and his son (Mickey Bennett) sneak away together, and the mother-in-law hires a detective (Leo Willis) to retrieve the son and arrest the kidnapper. Charley and his son go to the beach, where the comedy's big set piece takes place. While the pair is relaxing in the water, Charley's son loses his swimming outfit, so Charley gives him his oversized clothes and sends him to fetch a replacement. Typical Chase embarrassment/frustration comedy ensues.

To help Charley, the boy throws his father some swimming trunks off of the pier, but they get stuck on a part of the dock. The kid then tosses him a bag of clothes, but it turns out to be full of collars. Charley is eventually spotted by a lifeguard, who, thinking he's in trouble, swims out and tries to bring him back to shore; Chase ends up knocking him out and, after his son tosses him some clothing (which turns out to be a kimono), brings the lifeguard back to shore! The following scene, a tracking shot showing a crowd of people gathering behind Charley as he walks down the boardwalk in a very feminine kimono, is a classic Chase embarassment mise-en-scene, so characteristic of his style that it is repeated in his later talkie Young Ironsides. When Charley later loses his kimono, he emerges wearing a barrel, a memorable comic image that found its way into contemporary ads for the film. Charley quickly loses the barrel, and another comic sequence follows, one which finds Charley forever stumbling upon groups of people, continually exposing them to his public nudity. Through a frenzied series of comic turns, including Charley's impersonation of a detective by stealing the clothes of the detective trailing him and using dog fur as a mustache, Charley has the mother-in-law arrested by the police for child abuse. Finally, Charley is able to meet up with his wife and the two have a heartfelt reconciliation. The scene is played seriously, as noted in Brian Anthony and Andy Edmonds's Charley Chase biography, for about thirty seconds, and after a final piece of slapstick, the fun little short comes to a close.

No Father to Guide Him is one of the more obscure Pathe-released Charley Chase comedies and this is rather unfortunate, as it is a fun, inventive little film. It was the seventh two-reeler of the Chase series, which only expanded to two-reels earlier in the year. In many ways, No Father to Guide Him is rough, early Chase, lacking the sophistication of plot and situation Chase had already begun to develop, notably in his previous short Innocent Husbands, the prototype of so many marital farces he was to turn out by the end of the '20s. No Father to Guide Him was made at that early stage in Chase's career as a two-reel comedian when he was still experimenting in style, and differs from his mature shorts in two significant ways. Firstly, many of its gags, though clever, are still rough-and-tumble knockabout, residual gagging left over from his one-reel days. Secondly, and importantly, it contains a hint of pathos that rarely, if ever, rears its head in the entire Chase series. The pathos is not layered on heavily, however, and provides a sweet undertone to the comedy. Such scenes as the one in which Charley sneaks into his wife's house to see his son -- a policeman spots Charley but ignores him because "that's the only time he gets to see his son" -- give the short a tenderness it would otherwise not have.

The comedy's gags, although more physical and slapstick in nature than the ones in his mature comedies, are very often quite funny and inventive. The short begins with a typical Chase commentary on the institution of marriage. The comedy opens with Charley at work as a milkman. While delivering milk, he wears a bowl-shaped World War I-era army helmet on his head in order to protect him from the wrath of wives who, armed with rolling pins, mistake him for their husbands returning from a night of carousing. And yes, Charley does later pour milk into his helmet and then accidentally dumps it on his head. The set piece of the short, the scene where Charley loses his clothes at the beach, was a good one and, as previously mentioned, later remade in his talkie Young Ironsides (1932), although with a bit less success. The fact that Chase deemed it good enough to use in a later short, and its elements of embarrassment, frustration, and good humor make the beach bit from No Father to Guide Him a classic Charley Chase scene. The only weak sequence in the film is the short one in which Charely, unclothed, keeps running into a crowd of people on the beach. The scene is finely executed, but the laughs are lost a little on modern audiences because the '20s definition of "unclothed" seems to be wearing long undergarments that are not very revealing by today's standards.

As a side note, the beach scene features two notable performers. One is a pre-King Kong Fay Wray, who plays the ticket girl at the locker room. Wray was signed with Roach during this period and can also be seen in another Chase short from the same year, Isn't Life Terrible? The lifeguard was played by Duke Kahanamoku, one of the great Olympic swimmers, who won the gold medal at the 1912 and 1920 games, and the silver in 1924, the year before this comedy was released. He was undoubtedly recognizable to audiences of the day, making the scene in which Chase punches him out and carries him back to shore all the funnier.

In addition to the excellence of some of the comedy's gags, No Father to Guide Him, like the best of Chase's silent comedies, contains some amusing comic touches. Chase gives an energetic and endearing performance, and one highlight of the film, although it is a very brief moment, is the look on Chase's face during a scene in which he is dressed up as a detective. A suspicious policeman spots him and asks if he's undercover. Chase agrees and the policeman falls for it. Walking away, Chase turns his head to the camera, his face conveying utter amazement that he got away with that old trick! It is one of those moments found throughout the Chase canon in which Charley looks directly at the camera, aware of the audience -- which just goes to show that Oliver Hardy was not the only comedian of the period who would regularly break the fourth wall. Such subtle and endearing moments set Charley Chase apart from other, lower-echelon comedians. The suspicious policeman in the scene is, incidentally, the same one who provides an amusing running gag throughout the film, one that can be appreciated by silent comedy buffs. This policeman, like the detective, is constantly trailing Charley, but for a slightly different reason -- he is on the lookout for a dangerous criminal, who turns out to be none other than Bull Montana, the menacing silent comedy villain! There are no two performers in the history of silent comedy who look more different than Charley Chase and Bull Montana. Interestingly enough, Montana features prominently in the Chase classic Limousine Love, cast against type as Charley's chauffeur who is brought to tears after Charley scolds him a few minutes into the short. Chase, it seems, enjoyed toying with Montana's screen reputation as a intimidating brute.

All in all, No Father to Guide Him, although an early Chase two-reeler, is a very satisfying short. Its fun, freewheeling atmosphere and appealing performances make it a memorable comedy. While rare and not as famous as some of Chase's other two-reelers, No Father to Guide Him goes to show that during the silent era, even Chase's lesser-known work demonstrate silent comedy at its best.

Still photographs courtesy of Cole Johnson. Advertisement of film courtesy of Festival Films.

Back to the main page of "The World of Charley Chase"