Fighting Fluid

Fighting Fluid (1925)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Charley Chase plays the type of character he does best, which is a weak nerd who is constantly letting people push him around. This happens at his work when a co-worker sneaks off with the boss's daughter who just happens to be the crush for Charley. After accidentally getting loaded on bootleg whiskey, Charley gets some courage and goes out to get his woman. This is a pretty politically incorrect little comedy that just shows women as targets for men but as long as you don't take it too serious then you should get a few laughs out of it. The sequence with Chase being drunk and busting into his loves house is pretty funny as is a later sequence when he thinks her leg has fallen off. Running just over ten-minutes this short really doesn't get to expand into too much story but what's here isn't bad and it's a tad bit darker than a few of the earlier Chase movies.

Back when prohibition was in effect in the 1920s and early 1930s, it was very common to see comedies use bootleg as a catalyst for comedy situations, and many use drunkenness as a way to generate laughs. See Laurel and Hardy's excellent short "Blotto." This isn't surprising, since seeing people do forbidden, alluring things and, often, make fools of themselves in the process, is always a mine for comedy.

Here we see Charley Chase's take on that pervasive comedy trope of the time, through the unlikely circumstance that his boss stored his bootleg hooch in an office water cooler. Chase may not be spinning everything here out of his own imagination, but even as he uses the stock drunkenness plot from countless comedies of this era, it becomes thoroughly a Charley Chase comedy. The drunkenness is a way of moving Charley's character along in a comedy of character and situation.

There is good office comedy in a beginning with Charley as a meek worker tormented by practical jokes from women he is afraid to talk to. After the drunk Charley does not just get a chance to show off a drunk act (which he does well) but also gains the courage to approach his secret love, developing plot and character, and opening more comedy possibilities that are distinctly Charley Chase. Even a gag involving confusing a mannequin of a woman's leg for the real thing, used so many times by Charley's fellow comedian Harry Langdon, is worked into the compact comedy of embarrassment.

A very funny film, showing how handily Charley Chase could take a common stock idea and make it into something very much his own.