20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang

Five prisoners escape from a chain gang work crew. The prison system is being investigated by a blue ribbon commission which orders a series of lavish changes. Upon hearing about the changes, the escapees all gather to return to the prison.

It's all a little surreal from the very start. The dogs are just comedically silly. I almost like this for its silliness. This is a strange little short. I don't know any of these performers and it's not like the performances are so great. The coke bottle picnic dance is cringe. They seem like second tier talents being given something to do. This is a bit of nothingness.

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.

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.

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.

"Interesting" is rather a neutral adjective, connoting neither good nor bad. (In fact, remember that supposed Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times.")

But "20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang" is much more interesting than entertaining.

It is one of the numerous Vitaphone shorts presented by Turner Classic Movies on the 90th anniversary of Vitaphone, then shown On Demand as part of a couple hours of some of the shorts.

Jerry Bergen, whoever he was, is the nominal star, but he was more of a distraction, with a silly hairdo and almost as silly mannerisms. (He somewhat reminded me of Joe Besser.)

However, as the ridiculous, but intendedly so, story continued, the movie became eminently watchable because of some beautiful legs among some talented dancers.

Roy Mack directed hundreds of these Vitaphone shorts, and naturally some of them were better, and some, like this one, not so much.

James Baskett is the uncredited singer, and is always worth hearing, and Harry Shannon, a good actor, is the uncredited warden.

Sure, give it a look. It won't take more than a few minutes, and you might get a kick out of the very non-seriousness.