The Cracked Ice Man

Charley is having a weird first day teaching at a boy's school. He gets into an argument with an iceman, rescues Florence Roberts' canary and is roped into teaching a kindergarten class -- and, of course, falls in love with co-star Betty Mack.

This one is mostly about the co-stars. Billy Gilbert shows up as the rather fey principal of the school and Charley's class is composed of members of Our Gang. Charley had a long connection to Our Gang. He had been the supervising producer of the series in its first year and had appeared in a couple of their shorts in the middle of the previous decade.

This one is structured a lot more erratically than most of Chase's shorts in this period, but he does get to sing a duet with Betty Mack to close out the movie. As with almost all of his shorts, this one is a delight.

Charley Chase is a very underrated early comic. After all, he not only starred in a bunch of wonderful Hal Roach shorts, he often directed his an other comics' films and was very adept at it. However, despite my being a big fan, I must admit that "The Cracked Ice Man" is a very poor outing. There are two main reasons. First, there's singing and not the good type. Second, the plot seems very vague and disorganized and as a result the comedy really never gets going.

The plot finds Charley hired as a teacher but learning that instead of teaching psychology, he's been assigned a kindergarten class. The problem is that this didn't occur until the film was over halfway complete....and the film really did nothing to make the most of the children (several of which were members of the Little Rascals). Overall, you wonder why the usual formula is missing and the film just isn't funny...nor fun.