From Bad to Worse

Charley Chase's second movie for Columbia is a remake of the 1926 Billy Bevan short HUBBY'S QUIET LITTLE GAME. Director Dell Lord and writer Al Giebler had worked on the earlier movie and its producer, Mack Sennett had a habit of raising cash by selling off scripts from his old movies since his studio had collapsed.

While this is a typically highly competent movie, Chase and Lord had not yet begun to develop the details that would show up in the best of their Columbia shorts. Timid Charley is on his honeymoon with Peggy Stratford, hoping to make a business connection with Bud Jamison (in the role played by Vernon Dent in the earlier movie in a standout performance) and keeps running into Jamison's wife under embarrassing circumstances. The gags are mostly typical Columbia head clunks with loud sound effects and dangling from suspenders, rendered amusing by the experts, but nothing that other comedy pros could not have performed.

It wouldn't be long until Charley and Dell would begin to develop their own brand of comedy, pitched midway between the Columbia house style typified by the Three Stooges and Charley's Roach comedies in which the gags arose uniquely out of comedy. However, it isn't in here.

When "From Bad to Worse" begins, Charley has gotten married. The very shy pair are on their honeymoon on a sleeper train when Charley sees an old friend. The friend, it turns out, knows a business prospect that Charley is trying to impress and the friend tells him that the guy is a real 'man about town'. In other words, Charley should impress the future client that he's a real playboy. The problem is that in the process he convinces his wife the same thing. Plus, the neighbor he's pretending to have a fling with turns out to be the wife of this man he's trying hard to impress.

This is a pretty typical Columbia short for Charley Chase, as many have him in various marital problems--usually where the wife thinks he's cheating on her. While not as good as many of his Hal Roach Studio shorts from earlier in his career, this one is agreeable and has a few laughs.