Jeffries Jr.

Jeffries Jr. (1924)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Jimmy Jump (Charley Chase) is scared of his own shadow so he goes to former boxing champ James J. Jeffries to get into shape. That's pretty much the entire story to this 9-minute short, which is somewhat of a disappointment since there's not too much done with what could have been a good story. I don't think anyone would accuse Roach's Jimmy Jump series of containing excellent writing but at least the previous films had some sort of story going for them. The best joke here is one they keep repeating as Jimmy puts on glasses whenever he thinks he's about to get into a fight. Outside of this we see Jeffries throw a few punches at him, make him run and eventually make him tough. He makes Jimmy tough yet we never see it in any sort of payoff. The entire movie makes you think that Roach and company just took the easy way out of cutting back on a story just because they had someone, along with Chase, to sell the picture. It's a decent time killer but don't expect any laughs.

I'm a big fan of Charley Chase, but I think that while this film, from his early "Jimmy Jump" series is enjoyable, it is nowhere near his best. The previous film "Young Oldfield," had featured famous racer Berney Oldfield as a guest star to get the proceedings going along. Here the guest star is famous boxer James J. Jeffries, and he's more at the center of events. This isn't necessarily a good thing, since the necessity of using Jeffries seems to have hurt the development of the comic storyline.

Chase is a young weakling (perhaps prefiguring the "nance" twist he would later develop for his character) who seeks to get Jeffries to train him, and that is the extent of the plot. Chase injects some very good comedy here, including a running gag involving a pair of glasses that same him from every fight he almost gets into and an amusing sequence with a mirror, but mainly the basis is that Charley can't train to be quite the boxer that the former champion is. Fun as this is for the only ten minutes the short runs, there does seem to be a missed opportunity for some of the situation-based humor the Chase was expert at, and which he'd already proved did work well enough in the one-reel format.