Chase Yourself

It is one of the great weaknesses of the US comic tradition during the silent period that it so frequently tended towards the same slapstick devices and plot-tropes, used in film after film, until they became tiresome clichés. That typical conformism still bedevils modern attitudes towards the films, as though a film cannot be amusing unless it contains its fair share of custard pies, comic boxing, bombs and the rest of it. I cannot count the times that US reviewers emit the same puzzled question - "Where are the larfs, then?"

This film is a western parody treated with surprising seriousness (one of the best ways to approach parody) and its theme is too close to John Ford's 3 Bad Men to be a coincidence even if the Ford film did not actually appear until later in the year. Here a tenderfoot and two fellow-tramps come to the rescue of a lone woman just as Ford's three baddies/goodies do in his entertaining epic. The characters are not really developed here as the might have been which is in fact the main weakness of the film. If a film chooses drama (even absurd drama) over laughs, then it also needs characterisation.

There is knockabout comedy here but it is to the director's credit that it is not allowed to destroy the mock-seriousness of tone as the film relates how the innovations made by Jimmie on the farm - a Keaton-like delight in gadgets that features in other Adams comedies - enable him to outwit and capture the outlaws. There's not much too it and it falls between two stools in being neither especially dramatic nor especially funny, but it is an interesting attempt, makes a pleasant change and remains a mildly enjoyable film.

Jimmie Adams is mistaken for "Two Gun Joe" and the ranch hands all scatter. Molly Malone is just as glad, since they had decided that every day is a holiday except pay day, so she offers the job running the ranch to Adams.

There are some funny gags here, but they're not particularly funny because of Adams's handling of them; instead, they are large mechanical gags, windlasses that hoist loads of hay to the loft, that turn out to have a plot point.

Chase Yourself (1926)

** (out of 4)

Flat Western spoof has a female gaining control of a ranch after the death of her father. Her crew refuses to listen to her or do their work so she fires them but when they refuse to leave the land they're forced off by a man they think is the legendary Two-Gun Joe. It turns out its just a tramp (Jimmie Adams) so the tough guys come back to teach him a lesson. Adams would go onto do some Hal Roach comedies but judging by this film calling him a comedian would be a tad bit of a stretch. To be fair the screenplay is incredibly weak and there simply aren't any good jokes so it's probably unfair to judge the actor just by this one film. The biggest problem is certainly the screenplay that really doesn't have anything fresh or original going for it. The mistaken identity is never played for any laughs and the various issues that the tramp gets involved in aren't funny either. Some of the jokes are rather simple like him messing up on his new job as a ranch hand but again, it's not funny. The ending has the tough guys coming back to push him around and this is where we get into more physical humor but once again it's simply not funny. At 13-minutes the film moves along well enough but at the same time there's no real reason to watch it.

While today Jimmy Adams is pretty much forgotten, this film is well worth seeing. And, while he might not have been among the elite comedians of the day, in this film he was blessed with great gag writers.

Jimmy is an Easterner who arrives out west. Soon he meets up with a couple hobos and they become friends. At the same time, a young lady inherits a ranch and the men that work for her make fun of her and treat her with contempt. So, when Jimmy accidentally defeats the leader and then is mistaken for a wanted criminal, the rest of the employees run off and Jimmy and his new friends are hired to run the place. And, by the end, they then managed to capture the real wanted man and save the day again. Does any of this sound funny? No...not really. But the sight gags were terrific. Explaining them to you would spoil them but again and again the writers figured out how to make the most of every scene. See it and you'll know what I mean. Quite good.