Poker at Eight

Poker at Eight (1935)

* (out of 4)

Incredibly bad short has Charley Chase playing a wimp husband who gets pushed around by his oh-so-perfect wife. He wants to go out and play poker with the boys but she won't let him so Chase tries to hypnotize her. Once again, there's not a single laugh to be found in this MGM short. The entire film is incredibly dull and even at 18-minutes the thing seems to be way too long. I've enjoyed most of Chase's silent films and a couple of his sound shorts but this one here is by far the worst I've seen.

"Poker at Eight" is real vintage Charley Chase. In this short from his series at Hal Roch studios the comedian manages to make a witty, complicated farce of sorts fit comfortably into two reels. One of his specialties was taking an outlandish premise and elaborating his day-to-day consequences to make hilarious social comedy. Here he's a husband who's normally under his wife's thumb but who thinks he's developed the ability to hypnotize people. It turns out his wife only pretends to be hypnotized into being a "good fellow" and makes him jealous, seeming to head out for a night on the town while he makes the titular poker game.

The gag construction and plot twists are very funny here -- my favorite moment involving Charley having to carry a zither around with him for no good reason. Constance Bergen does a very good job as Charley's wife; she seems to have appeared in little more than a couple of other Chase shorts and a few smaller roles in Westerns, but here she's very funny making the transition between stern housewife and stern housewife-pretending-to-be-good-time-girl.

This a good example of the kind of sophisticated comedy Charley Chase could produce while still engaging in the kind of visual humor that has him hiding from police officers in a bright raincoat on a clear night. It's also a very funny watch.

"Poker at Eight" exhibits the situation comedy at the height of its form! The camerawork, set design, and, particulary, the acting of Charley Chase and Constance Bergen sparkles with wit, truth, and immense charm. The songs in "Poker at Eight" are witty and well-integrated into the plot. Charley Chase at the height of his art as a writer, singer, composer, and director of comedy. A definite precursor to screwball comedy!

Constance Bergen won't let husband Charley Chase go out to play poker with the boys. Then Chase convinces himself he can hypnotize people, and hypnotizes her into "being a good guy". So she tells him he can go play poker. When she puts on a slinky dress to paint the town red, however, that's another matter.

Chase's shorts are back in form, with a song, a good story, and Chase's usual impeccable gag construction. After a series of pretty but uninspiring leading ladies, present mostly to react to Chase's gags, Miss Bergen gets to do a bit more, and to do it very nicely.

... that being a friend of Charley's who, while playing golf, Charley thinks he has hypnotized. Dugan thinks so too. What actually happened is that Charley's wife, also playing golf, hit Tom in the back of the head with her golf ball and knocked him out for just a minute. This supposed talent comes in handy one night when Charley wants to go play poker with the boys, but the wife will not hear of it. He has to stay home with her. So he attempts to hypnotize her saying "you are a good fellow, you want your husband to go out". Since she is perfectly conscious when Charlie does this, she decides to teach him a lesson by becoming a "good fellow", dressing to the nines and going out on the town by herself. This development has Charley forgetting all about the poker game.

Ever notice how the Hal Roach characters live in the safest neighborhoods? There is always a beat cop just outside of their house. But even Charley's beat cop wants to know what Charlie is doing "harrassing a woman" - his wife - while he is carrying a zither under his arm. Oh, and we get to see Chase sing a rather silly song in this one. I don't know, maybe Charley's wife was right, those poker buddies in the opening scene looked a lot like gangsters to me.

The studios should have studied the Roach comedies more. They had a blueprint on how to entertain audiences in the production code era. Here you take a common occurrence - a man wants to go out with his buddies but his wife is against it -and you add a bunch of absurdities that create a great comic narrative.