The Four Clowns: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, and Buster Keaton.
The Four Clowns: Stan Laurel, Oliver Hardy, Charley Chase, and Buster Keaton.
Four Clowns was not the first time Charley Chase was featured in Youngson's anthologies - Chase's silent classic Movie Night, after all, opened Youngson's When Comedy Was King (1960). In Laurel & Hardy's Laughing Twenties (1965), a compilation otherwise focusing on Chase's Hal Roach colleagues, Chase is featured in clips from Never the Dames Shall Meet (1927) and Snappy Sneezer (1929). However, overall, Four Clowns contains the most Chase footage of all the Youngson compilations, and is the preservationist's most sustained effort at promoting Chase's silent era work.
The Charley Chase footage in Four Clowns includes snippets from such Chase comedies as What Price Goofy? (1925); Fluttering Hearts (1927), which features a remarkable scene between Chase and Oliver Hardy; the aviation spoof Us (1927); a couple of scenes from the late silent Family Group (1928), which is otherwise lost; and, what certainly seems to have been one of Youngson's favorites, Movie Night. The highlight of Four Clowns is a potted ten-minute abridgement of Chase's 1928 silent classic Limousine Love.
Clips from Us serve to introduce the Chase section of the film. In this two-reeler, Charley attempts to muster up enough courage to take his first ride in an airplane, still somewhat of a novelty for most in the 1920s, in the aftermath of Lindberg's famous flight. Subsequently, we see Chase confront more ordinary challenges in his Family Group, co-starring prominent Hal Roach supporting player Edgar Kennedy. All Charley wants to do in Family Group is get a nice family portrait taken by a professional photographer (Kennedy). But every conceivable obstacle is in Charley's way, and, as in many of Chase's mature comedies of the period, these frustrations develop gradually. Charley wants a balloon to be in the picture, but a bratty kid in the photographer's studio repeatedly pops it. Finally, Charley buys a bundle of balloons and is then hoisted up into the air, soaring unsteadily and uncontrollably above Culver City in a remarkable sequence that lifts the film above its mundane origins, thereby entering the realm of incongruous silent comedy fantasy and providing Chase with an iconic sequence which makes one long for the recovery of the rest of this two-reeler.
The obvious highlight of Four Clowns, however, is the abbreviated version of his classic Limousine Love. In this comic masterpiece, Charley is on the way to his wedding, and unwittingly - through no fault or indiscretion of his own - finds a naked woman (the vivacious Viola Richard) in the backseat of his car. Like the best Chase comedies, it all makes perfect sense within the airtight comic logic of the film - and it would lose a certain something if its various plot points were carefully explained away. Nevertheless, the film's risque and outrageous premise, aided by stellar performances from Chase, Richard and Edgar Kennedy, all contribute to its classic status. Indeed, Limousine Love was essentially rediscovered through Youngson's inclusion of it in Four Clowns, and many view the Limousine Love footage as the crowing glory of the Chase segment, if not of Youngson's entire compilation film. Youngson had gone on record to say that he had sought to reestablish Chase's reputation as a major player in early film comedy by including a great deal of Chase's silent era work throughout his anthologies, and nowhere is this more evident than in Four Clowns, where the neglected Chase is placed alongside his more famous colleagues Laurel & Hardy and Buster Keaton and, as Youngson's selected footage suggests, he is shown to have reached equal standing, albeit belatedly, with the other comic greats.
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