20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang

A wonderful and often funny look at the life in a chain gang. Worth checking out if you could find it anywhere. It was well acted, nicely directed, and pretty interesting in its humorous look at Chain Gang farm under inspection.

Of all the ludicrous places to set a musical short, some very kooky people at Vitaphone thought it would be a great idea to have it be on a chain gang!! Yes, when I think of song and dance, I often think of chain gangs!!

When the film starts, the chain gang is singing up a storm and having an awfully good time, or so it seems. Some of these guys actually DO want to escape and they soon bolt towards freedom. Go figure...as it looked awfully amusing on the chain gang! Soon the law goes chasing after these fellows and the escapees wander upon a swell dance party...and everyone runs away when they see these guys in striped uniforms. Little do the escapees know that they SHOULD have stayed with the gang. This is because in the meantime, a committee is coming to inspect the barracks and the health of the chain gang. Because of this the boss decides to make a few 'small changes' to impress the committee. This actually is VERY funny...and you just have to see it for yourself. And what does happen to these five escapees? Just see it for yourself...you won't regret it.

This movie manages to work for one reason...it is completely ludicrous and silly. Anthing else would have been in bad taste and stupid....and while this one is very stupid, it's stupid in a GOOD way! Very cute and surprisingly funny...and a nice counterpoint to Warner's big hit from the year before, "I Was a Fugitive From a Chain Gang".

This Warners short, which I presume ran on the same bill as Mervyn LeRoy's "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," is a mostly tired and unfunny film. It reminded me of just about every "Saturday Night Live" skit ever made, in which all of the actors think the material is funnier than the people watching it, and push a one-note joke to the brink of exhaustion.

It is sort of fun to watch this after LeRoy's movie, because it spoofs specific details from the movie rather than its premise in general. Replacing the jailers' pack of bloodhounds with a bunch of fluffy white poodles was sort of funny, and I also liked the bellboy whose uniform was made of prison stripes.

There are a lot of musical numbers incorporated into the action, performed by people I'd never heard of. The whole thing feels very patchwork and grade Z, with terrible sound and only the most cursory attention given to the actual film-making.

In this bizarre little variety short, four convicts on the chain gang escape and disrupt a chorus line singing about soda pop; they escape in the confusion. In the meantime, the warden, facing a blue ribbon committee, liberalizes the penal operation, allowing the prisoners to go shooting, and hiring chorines to dance at the daily steak dinners.

Since it's from Warner Brothers, we take a look at I WAS A PRISONER FROM THE CHAIN GANG, based on a real story, and realize this is an attack on the state from whom the man escaped; it was Georgia. They claimed their chain gangs were run with the utmost humanity. So this burlesques that.

Unfortunately, it's too over the top. Nowadays, we may look at it without the context of the moment. You can't really do that.

I don't mind parodies at all--I loved "The Producers" and think "Springtime for Hitler" is terrific--but the people who did this travesty hadn't the slightest idea of what a parody was. This schizophrenic little short doesn't quite know what it's supposed to be--it bounces from slapstick comedy to musical numbers to (somewhat) serious comments on the brutal chain-gang system, and fails miserably at all of them. The lead "comic", someone named Jerry Bergen, was someone I had never seen before and, hopefully, won't see again. As bad as this short is, he makes it even worse, and with his incessant mugging, shouting and forced slapstick he manages to combine the worst excesses of Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey into one annoying and talentless little twerp.

If there's anything that could be even remotely considered to be a bright spot, it's a bevy of scantily dressed chorus girls doing a Radio City Rockette-type production number in the prison's chow hall--don't ask--and there's an amusing bit where the prison authorities track down the escaped prisoners not with large bloodhounds but with small poodles. Other than that, this atrocity has absolutely nothing whatsoever going for it.