Thundering Tenors

Thundering Tenors (1931)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Hal Roach short has Charlie Chase playing a tenor who gets invited to a party, which he eventually destroys. I've become a big fan of Chase, both his silent and sound pictures, but this one here is without a doubt the worst I've seen. The movie contains no laughs and nearly put me to sleep several times during its short 20-minute running time.

I'm a fan of Chase but his Columbia shorts are really hit and miss. As of now, the only way to view these shorts is on Turner Classic Movies but hopefully one day Columbia will release them to DVD as they did with their Buster Keaton shorts.

"Thundering Tenors" is a neat little two-reel comedy that takes Charley Chase out of the husband-and-wife situations he usually worked in (one could say Chase was the grandfather and patron saint of the family sitcom on TV) and casts him in a devastating parody of Rudy Vallée, a radio singer who crashes a fancy party with a megaphone in one hand and a saxophone case in the other (though we never hear him actually sing in the film) and generates the usual havoc associated with a Hal Roach two-reeler. A brilliantly funny wrestling scene between Chase and a lady doctor and the hilarious reactions of the woman hosting the party — who's afraid Chase's antics will get her in wrong with the U.S. Senator who's her principal guest — are the highlights, and the odd little interjections from solo jazz instruments making non-verbal wisecracking comments during the dialogue scenes are a far more creative use of music than was typical for Roach comedies.

Charley is invited to a high class party and he feels ill at ease, as he has no idea how to act--yet he wants to impress his lady. When one of the guest suggests he just copy the manners of one of the society ladies there, all goes wrong. And, each time something embarrassing happens, there was inexplicably some very loud, inappropriate and unfunny musical sound effects. As the film continued, it only got worse until by the end of the film I was ready to scream. Now, with the summary above you'd probably assume I hated Charley Chase but this couldn't be further from the truth--I just hate this awful and totally unfunny comedy. When Chase was on his A-game (such as in MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE), he was hilarious and tough to beat but he also made a bunch of mediocre films and even a few bad ones here and there. Of the three or four dozen films of his I have seen, this is by far the worst. Avoid it and try ANY other Chase film.

Believe me, I understand that Charley Chase did a lot better shorts than this one -- his next was the classic THE PIP FROM PITTSBURGH. Despite the title, Charley doesn't sing, the leading lady is Dorothy Granger and not Thelma Todd, the gags seem a lot more random and unprefigured, and instead of musical cues, we get Marvin Hatley doing sound effects. The thing is, random and chaotic and un-Chase-like as they are, they're all funny and I enjoyed the movie vastly.

Still, it's not top-drawer Chase, and when things go wrong, you look for a scapegoat. I'm going to point the finger at studio head Hal Roach. This was Jame Horne's last credit as Chase's director. He would be turned over to direct Laurel & Hardy, and although his replacement would be Charley's brother James Parrott, the set must have been chaotic by Chase's standards. Roach did this a lot to Charley, moving his director to another unit, on the grounds that he was a fine comedy director himself. Yeah, but when you're appearing in a movie, you need a director, and the movie suffers.

Still, there are plenty of funny gags -- I love the sequence in which chiropractor Lena Malena tries to remove a fishbone from Charley's throat, I think the sound effects are very funny and Dorothy Granger is cute as a bug in her first big role, even though she didn't last.