What a Bozo!

Charley is a night club band leader, with a yen for rich, snobby customer Elizabeth Forrester, and plagued by smart-aleck chorus girl Gay Seabrook. When Charley gets invited to Miss Forrester's party, he thinks he has a shot at her, but he's there to provide music for her idiotic pageant.

Charley offers a fine rendition of his theme song, "Smile When the Raindrops Fall" and his usual fine comedy gags, but it's the helium-voiced Miss Seakbrook who gets to set off the funniest bits here. I think that, barring Thelma Todd, she was the most capable leading comedienne Chase worked with, but apparently not suitable for the long run for whatever reasons Chase and Hal Roach settled on.

While some people may hold that this is far from the best comedy that Chase turned out -- and they'd be right -- it's like arguing which is the ugliest Sennett Bathing Beauty. This is a very funny comedy and that is good enough for me.

In the silent and early sound era, Charley Chase (in reality, 'Charles Parrott') was en exceptionally busy comedian and director--having made about 300 shorts. Despite his very prolific body of work, few today know who he was--partly because his films are rarely seen on TV (aside from a few on Turner Classic Movies lately) and because his films were wildly inconsistent--particularly the sound ones. Sometimes, they rivaled Laurel and Hardy's in quality and other times they are just dreadful (such as SOMETHING SIMPLE or THUNDERING TENORS). While WHAT A BOZO is not one of the dreadful ones, it isn't a whole lot better--offering only a few laughs.

Charley plays a band leader who takes a young lady for granted. It's obvious that she loves him but dumb Charley has his sights set impossibly high on a snooty society dame. During Charley's hopeless quest to catch the rich lady, the other does her best to make Charley look like some kind of nut. Unfortunately, most of this just isn't very funny.

In addition, watching young Black kids singing "Old Black Joe" in one scene is probably something I didn't need to see (it in no way enhanced the film). While I am far from politically correct and hate this form of censorship, I could definitely understand and respect people who would find this scene objectionable or in poor taste.

Not a great film by any standard and understandably one of Charley's poorest efforts that I've yet seen. I have seen about fifty of his films and this is close to as many as now exist--as many as 200 have simply disintegrated due to the passage of time and its effect on nitrate film.

"What a Bozo!" is one of Charley Chase's more lightweight comedies. The plot isn't stunningly intricate as in some of his other films, nor are the gags or situations as mind-boggling and outlandish. It's still wonderfully entertaining, though, with a buoyant, jolly, musical spirit that makes it very fun viewing (the mood is enhanced by the plot's allowing even more than the usual share of bouncy Leroy Shields background music).

Charley is a bandleader, essentially, who is trying to impress a high-society girl while his plans are being frustrated by a dancer who fancies him instead. This film features a (sadly interrupted) sequence of Charley singing "Smile When the Raindrops Fall," which became a kind of theme song (and later the title for his biography), which humorously sets up the funniest and best set-up gags of the short, as Charley gets drenched no fewer than three times while trying to impress the woman.

Elizabeth Forrester's acting is really quite stiff as the society woman, but that somehow actually works a little bit in the comedy's favor in certain ways as she humorously responds to Charley's fine comedy acting in Margaret DuMont fashion. Gay Seabrook, the bozo of the title (in very much a throwaway line), is very cute and funny as Charley's admirer, making me want to find some material from the comedy team she apparently belonged to, Seabrook and Treacy.

Much of the second half of the film is taken up by Charley's attempts to save Elizabeth's home pageant despite not have brought and orchestra and Gay's attempts to sabotage it (in which are some nice gags), which threatens to turn this short into almost as much a musical novelty as a Charley Chase comedy, but always in an infectiously fun way.

This might not necessarily be Charley Chase in his most exemplary film or at the height of his art, but it does a great job of showing that even with a slighter situation he would turn in not a throwaway but a thoroughly entertaining twenty minutes.