Girl Grief

The plot for "Girl Grief" is a bit similar to Harold Lloyd's wonderful film "Girl Shy", as both play men who are absolutely paralyzed with fear around women!

"Good Grief" begins with a teacher calling in sick, so the school is going to use her son, Charley (Charley Chase). This actually is a good fit, as Chase had a lovely singing voice and used it in several of his short comedies. But Charley is incredibly scared around women...which makes him teaching the class a bit of a problem! And, when the young ladies at the school find out, they make the most of this!

For the most part, this is a funny and enjoyable short. I particularly liked to see Charley throwing a little tantrum (it was pretty cute) and SOME of the parts involving cats. I have no idea why, but the foley artist did NOT use real cat sounds and it's obvious and annoying. Also the bit where Charley dreams he's a cat is pretty dopey. But for me, the BIG problem with the film, despite its laughs, is that after a while they seemed to forget Charley was afraid of women...and this shows poor continuity and writing.

Charley Chase is the girl-shy son of a music teacher at a girl's school. When mom turns up ill, Charley has to take her place. To reassure him, she writes a note to art teacher Muriel Evans to keep an eye on him in this modified remake of Chase's 1927 WHAT WOMEN DID FOR ME.

This one is not a top notch Charley Chase short, but it is filled with good gags and a plethora of young, pretty women, including an uncredited Paulette Goddard. Because he is teaching music, the women wind up singing a scat version of "Seeing Nellie Home." Most of the latter half is taken up with a series of cat gags, instigated when some of the student's sneak into Charley's bed room and sprinkle his bed with cat nip. Soon a clowder of cats besiege Charley, and he tries with mixed results to get rid of them.

Robert Youngston observed that Charley Chase's life seemed to be "one long embarrassing moment," so it's not surprising that when this 1932 Hal Roach Studios short of his begins, he is thrust immediately into a situation that almost couldn't be designed to be more embarrassing -- he's a bashful man afraid of girls whose mother has arranged for him to substitute teach at an all girls school.

This is apparently a reuse of the premise of "What Women Did for Me," a silent short he starred in five years earlier and which I haven't seen, but this shouldn't detract at all. Chase and other comedians who transitioned to sound (such as Laurel and Hardy and Buster Keaton) made it fairly usual to take the premise of one of their silent films and rework it with material for talkies. In fact, one of the most fun sequences here, in which the girls surreptitiously start singing a jazzed-up version of "Seeing Nellie Home" instead of the one they have been given, and it slowly wins Charley over to the point of dancing along by the time his supervisors angrily arrive, depends very heavily on the audio element.

Charley is very funny playing up the bashful body language in contrast to his debonair appearance, and almost surprisingly most of the humor comes not from Charley being too timid to do is job but from the girls' having fun at his expense. It's in the vein of some of the freewheeling, structureless shorts that only someone like Charley could get away with doing. However, for much of it the girls' school is only a frame for a really hilarious gag sequence involving catnip covering a bed and, of course, all the cats it attracts. Having such a perfectly structured series of gags within such a loose short really works well.