Big Red Riding Hood

"Big Red Riding Hood" was a Charley Chase one-reeler released after he had already started releasing two-reel comedies. Maybe that led to a conception that he could save the complex mini-farce-like comedies of humiliation for the longer format where he could go into more detail, but for whatever reason this short is takes a goofy, wacky premise and runs with it in a goofy, wacky, very funny way.

Charley is a very poor bookworm who has received an offer that will make him rich if he translates "Little Red Riding Hood" into Swedish -- but he can't afford the books. So with the collaboration of a bookshop-owner's smitten daughter in Martha Sleeper (who is a great co-star -- cute as a button and very expressive; she's hilarious swooning over Charley's touch while he reads and absentmindedly touches her hand).

There follows an inspired series of complex and often set-piece gags of Charley Chase reading the book no matter what -- with a telescope above the shop's awning, and eventually bicycling next to its new owner's car, all with his usual taking of the totally absurd in stride. With Charley's singleminded determination on his goal and the impressive series of mechanical gags especially near the end this short actually starts to remind one of Buster Keaton.

There's also an inventive dream sequence inserted in which we see Charley imagining himself and another customer and Red Riding Hood and the Woodsman, an amusing concept. This is one of Charley's most memorable shorts -- growing out of a single monomaniac and absurd premise that he manages to make somehow believable, and full of inspired gags stemming from it.

There are two takes that one finds on Charley Chase. There are those who think of his silent films as some sort of preparation for what is to come after (although it is never very clear to me what glorious "afterwards" they are thinking about and there are those (myself included) who have little doubt that his best films are the silents and, to my mind, the best of those are to be found amongst the early "Jimmy Jump" series when Chase was working with Leo McCarey (later of course famous for his association with the best of Laurel and Hardy and with the Marx brothers as well ass such classic comedies as The Part-time Wife and The Awful Truth).

The Jimmy Jumps are of variable quality but some have a surreal quality that marks them out from the average Charley Chase film (of any period). My personal favourite is I think The Rat's Knuckles but this film runs it close in its cheer zaniness. Even the initial idea - that Jump has been commissioned to translate Little Red Riding Hood into Swedish - is excellent and sets the tone for the off-beat events that follow. There is crime and a car-chase but totally unlike the equivalent events in other comedies and perfectly integrated with the central fantasy - the obsessive reader - that runs through the entire film.

This is a genuinely crazy comedy short, almost dreamlike in its surreal story-line and imagery. It's hilarious and exhilarating if you're in the right kind of mood and willing to roll with it. Big Red Riding Hood is certainly not the sort of thing we expect from Charley Chase, who in this instance adopted the cartoon-y style of his brother Paul Parrott. As Hal Roach's director general Chase was influential in a studio-wide shift towards a more realistic comic technique, often based on the foibles of middle-class life and pretensions. In his own comedies Charley usually played a pleasant young man who worked in an office and was either married or dating, or sometimes both. In a typical short the gags develop naturally from the situation and the characters; Chase tended to avoid the anything-for-a-laugh approach favored at the Mack Sennett lot. In this early effort, however, Charley cut loose and experimented with a premise that's loony from the get-go, and just for good measure he tossed in a fantasy sequence that allows for more craziness.

Still known as "Jimmie Jump" at this point, Charley plays a bookish fellow who has been hired by the Swedish government to translate Little Red Riding Hood into Swedish. (They're offering 10,000 Krona for the job, which strikes me as a pretty good deal.) The problem is, Jimmie's so broke he can't afford to buy a copy of the book, so he lounges at an outdoor bookstall and browses a copy while surreptitiously working on his translation. He flirts shyly with the bookstore owner's daughter, played by the adorable Martha Sleeper, but flees when her father shows up. And yet when Jimmie fantasizes about the story he's translating he imagines not Martha in the lead role but a heavy, older woman who turns out to be a fellow customer. When another customer buys that copy of Red Riding Hood -- apparently the only one available -- and tosses it into his car, Jimmie's career is thrown into jeopardy. The situation worsens considerably when thieves attempt to steal the man's car, and the man pursues them in their vehicle with his own. Jimmie has no choice but to jump onto a bicycle and ride alongside the speeding car, and attempt to finish reading the story. (I guess he doesn't know the ending.) The car chase that ensues is, shall we say, one for the books.

The finale of this short offers one of the best comic chase sequences I've ever seen: it's fast and furious, expertly edited, and highlighted by a macabre gag that must be seen to be believed. Charley's Red Riding Hood fantasy, featuring an affable-looking German Shepherd as the wolf, is another highlight in a short that's packed with incident, all beautifully choreographed and which somehow unfolds as naturally as the weirdest dream you've ever had after eating too much spicy food.

This one-reel short was produced in 1924 as one of Chase's first starring efforts for Hal Roach, but it sat on the shelf for more than a year, perhaps due to concerns that it was so crazy it might alienate viewers unfamiliar with the star's more characteristic work. By the middle of 1925 Chase had established his style and was popular with audiences, so popular that he was moving into the longer two-reel format, so the studio must have figured that it was safe to release Big Red Riding Hood. I'm glad they did, and happier still that it survives to be enjoyed today. Even jaded film buffs who think they've seen it all may be pleasantly surprised by what they find here.

This Jimmy Jump short has one of the strangest plots I've seen. It seems that Jimmy (Charley Chase) has a chance to earn some money translating the story of "Little Red Riding Hood" into Swedish. But, he cannot afford to buy the book so he connives to read it for free. None of this is super funny until he spots the book in the back seat of a car and begins to read--then the laughs are a plenty--and the plot gets rather dark! "Big Red Riding Hood" has a nice sequence where Jimmy pictures the story in his mind. However, the film really heats up at the end--with a nice chase scene and a few very good laughs. Well worth seeing and like so many of the Jimmy Jump films, it's directed by the great Leo McCarey.

In this comedy short from 1925, Charley Chase in his character of Jimmy Jump, is asked to translate a Swedish copy of "Little Red Riding Hood" for the Swedish government. He begins to imagine himself in a land many years before in the setting of the book in question. This leads to some rather bizarre comic moments in the film. This isn't a very creative comedy but it's still OK. Charley Chase tends to be of a slightly acquired taste by today's standards.