The Tabasco Kid

Tabasco Kid, The (1932)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Pretty good short has Charley Chase playing a timid coward working on a ranch. When the owner's daughter comes back she informs him that she likes singing cowboys so Chase must quickly put a band together. Later in the picture a bandit (also played by Chase) shows up and it's one mistaken identity after another. THE TABASCO KID has a nice title, some decent laughs and a terrific performance by Chase who certainly makes the film worth viewing. Chase is so perfect here that you can't help but wish some of the filmmaking was a tad bit better so that the overall film would seem up to par with the performance. I really loved the way Chase played the bandit as he was perfect as that "Latin Lover" stance but he also does a fine job with the coward. I thought the sequence where he goes back and forth between the two parts was extremely well done by the actor. Billy Gilbert plays the ranch owner and gets a couple very good scenes and since his foot is broken you know it's going to get a lot of damage done to it. Some of the editing and cinematography are a tad bit rough and the film actually seems a lot older than it actually is. For a 1932 production the actual look of the film makes it seem a few years earlier. If you're unfamiliar with the work of Chase then this isn't his greatest film but it's a good example of his comic ability.

Among all the Charley Chase films I have seen, I think that generally his best films are his silents though a few talking pictures are a lot of funny--such as THE TOBASCO KID. Unlike many of his other shorts, this one is a lot of fun and has a lot more energy--plus the cliché of having comedians play exact doubles (such as Stan and Ollie in OUR HOSPITALITY) was rarely done better.

The film begins with Charley out West of all places. His girlfriend is returning home to the ranch and he decides to get all duded up like a movie singing cowboy to impress her. I wasn't too surprised to see this, as Chase sang in many of his films--having a rather pleasant voice. But what caught me off guard was having Charley also play an evil bandit whose mere name makes others run. I especially liked how her father (Billy Gilbert) reacted when he heard this desperado was about town. Unfortunately, everyone realizes that the bandit is here but the girl thinks this is Charley making a joke and she refuses to run or hide. All this leads to a dandy conclusion and I found myself laughing several times at the antics.

The only negative at all in the film was the schtick about the bandit howling like a coyote when he hears Charley singing. This is just stupid and detracts, just a bit, from the film. Otherwise, this is a top-notch Chase film.

Frances Lee returns to father Billy Gilbert's ranch, writing that she looks forward to hearing all the cowboy music. So Charley orders musical instruments for all the hands and instructs Larry Adler in how to play the harmonica. What no one realizes is that Charley is the exact double of the Tabasco Kid, a romantic bandito who makes love to Miss Lee, who thinks it's really Charley, so come on now.

The set-up allows Chase to play two characters in two different registers. In the 1920s, he had been the young man, and so quite reasonable in romantic situations. Now, however, he was almost forty. So he adjusted his character into a prissier version, one who wore glasses and could be a book keeper -- as he is here. However, he was still young enough that he could play the Mexican bandit, a spoof of Warner Baxter's Cisco Kid.

I have no idea why Billy Gilbert has one foot in a huge cast. It is funny, though.

I've never been the biggest fan in the world of Western-based comedies, as they often seem to me to rehash a lot of the same jokes at the expense of their very formulaic basis genre, but Charley Chase manages to make this Western-themed two-reel comedy very funny for me. He starts with the juxtaposition of his embarrassed, unintimidating character a clerk at a ranch who must impress his girl by pretending to have become a cowboy, and from this flows some pleasant sequences that both give him a chance to do some great comic song-performing and mock the ripe material of pervasive and unrealistic stereotypes of the singing cowboy.

It's a one of those Chase talkies that manages to be lots of freewheeling and loose fun while still leading to plenty of amusing and embarrassing or frustrating complications, and Charley pulls of some amusing twists on the old canard of the mistaken identity with the identical twin.

What really makes this short stand out, though, is the chances it gives Charley for an extra-bravura comedy performance. He's called upon here to play his usual comedy character, a dangerous macho Latin cowboy bandit, and his usual character trying to imitate the bandit. He rises to the challenge and his hilarious and impressive in the contrast. Plenty of opportunities in speech and song to show off his range and the fact that he was fluent in Spanish. He even gets a throwaway gag at the beginning to show of the Chinese doubletalk that he picked up growing up in Baltimore.

This is a funny comedy as you'd expect from it's star, avoiding stale Western jokes despite its Western setting and showing Charley in his versatile element as a comic performer.