Public Ghost #1

"Public Ghost No.1" is one of the few week shorts made by Charley Chase which give a false impression of the great, forgotten comedians art. Its too complicated at the beginning and too predictable in the second half. In a good Chase short you never knew what comes next - not in this one.

After a great meet cute with Joyce compton, Charley meets with Edwin Maxwell, who convinces him to go into business as a professional house haunter. The first gig he lands is to haunt the home of Miss Compton and her father, Clarence Wilson.

My, Miss Compton had hideous fathers in her shorts with Chase! I suppose she took after her mother. In any case, it's a fine Hallowe'en comedy, with a lot of the standard gags, but some nice variations and good executions, and how Charley sits so comfortably in an invisible chair is something I can't figure out.

Public Ghost #1 (1935)

*** (out of 4)

Funny film has Charley Chase meeting a woman and telling her that he's currently unemployed so she tells Chase to visit her father who will put him to work. Chase meets who he thinks is the father but it turns out he's just an impersonator and a tad bit crazy. The wrong man tells Chase he should make money by haunting houses, which he does and his first job just happens to have him in the home of the girl and the real father. LIVE GHOST #1 isn't a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination but I found it clever enough to be worth viewing. The film's first half is without a doubt the highlight as Chase pretty much just plays a supporting character and Edwin Maxwell is giving the opportunity to really shine as the crazy man. Maxwell is so brilliant in the part that you can't help but laugh at everything he does as no matter how crazy he's doing something he can make you fall for whatever he's saying. Just take a look at the sequence where he shows Chase his new invention, which just happens to be a fly catcher. Whoever came up with this device deserved an award for creativity. The second half of the film has Chase taking over as he begins to haunt the house not realizing that the woman he loves lives there. There are a few nice jokes during this sequence including a piece where Chase tries to prove himself a man but ends up going after the wrong person. Chase is as enjoyable as always but there's no question the film belongs to Maxwell.

Charley Chase is firmly ensconced in the second rank of American film comedians. He tended to play a fastidious man who gets increasingly exasperated as everything goes wrong. He starred in comedy shorts with plotlines which tended to be wildly implausible without actually becoming impossible. His onscreen character reminds me of several of the characters played by John Cleese ... but Chase lacked Cleese's broad physical talents and wide acting range. When I see a Chase film, I'm usually impressed by his professionalism rather than inspired to laugh at his onscreen antics.

'Public Ghost Number One' is a fairly typical Chase performance, enlivened by a remarkable supporting turn by Edwin Maxwell ... one of the truly great supporting actors who laboured in obscurity during the golden age of Hollywood. Maxwell, like Claude Rains, was a short stocky man with a finely-trained voice, who (also like Rains) might have become a star if he had been a few inches taller. Maxwell tended to play minor authority figures at cross-purposes to the hero of the film: he had a remarkable gift for twisting his mouth into scornful little knots of contempt. Maxwell played supporting roles in a lot of great films (he was one of Groucho Marx's cabinet ministers in 'Duck Soup'), but he was very seldom given an opportunity to show the full range of his talent.

In 'Public Ghost Number One', Chase is hired to haunt a house owned by Clarence Wilson and his attractive daughter. Wilson is another of those great and unjustly-neglected supporting actors. With his short build, beaked nose and his unusually-shaped balding head, Wilson gets laughs on the basis of his physical appearance and his grouchy personality.

Far and away, the best and funniest performance in this film is given by Maxwell. He plays a lunatic who has invented an incredibly complicated device for capturing and torturing flies. The fly-trap doesn't actually kill the fly ... but, after the fly goes through this Rube Goldberg device, it crawls away and dies of embarrassment. Maxwell is great in this film, and I regret that he never got a better role than this one. I'll rate this film 5 points out of 10 on the strength of Maxwell's performance.