His Wooden Wedding

While slapstick luminaries Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd spent most of the 1920s in feature films, the short comedy format in which these men had started was still very popular and a consistent money maker for that premier silent comedy factory, the Hal Roach studios. Charley Chase is not a big name today, but back in the 1920s, among those who were doing shorts and not doing features, he was a front runner.

His Wooden Wedding is one of the neater, more concise Charley Chase shorts, which tended to be stuffed with gags but a little haphazard in structure. Even this one however manages to be fairly disparate in its settings, moving from a wedding ceremony to an ocean liner. Director Leo McCarey keeps things suitably silly, with lots of exaggerated bits of physical comedy that are almost cartoonish. When a suitcase is dropped onto a car, the front wheels come off. McCarey keeps that dilapidated car in the foreground like an accident waiting to happen. The gags aren't always of the highest quality he knows how to present them for best effect.

And just like the car, Charley Chase's main function in these comedies is to overreact. He is a little like that prolific supporting player Edward Everett Horton, in that his horrified expressions add a whole extra layer to the comedy. That slight turn of the head, the rigid body, the mouth in an "O" of shock, is Chase's trademark. He can crank it up depending on the level of surprise, here adding some owlish blinking when he is informed of his fiancé's wooden leg. A key sequence is the flash-forward, Charley's bizarre daydream that having a wooden leg is hereditary, and all his children will be similarly afflicted. It is on the one hand a typical bit of Roach studios absurdity, but it's also very much in keeping with Chase's comedy persona, whose responses become wildly irrational.

Charley Chase never starred in a full-length movie, which is probably the main reason he is not so well known today. Fortunately, just as we are starting to reassess the value of Chaplin's and Keaton's early work, so too are the short comedies of lesser known comedians being rediscovered. Chase is by no means as accomplished as those great comics, but at a time when Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton were getting ever more ambitious, Chase was still managing to do some pretty funny things in a twenty-minute slot.

Unknown to Charley, the Best Man at his wedding is secretly in love with the Bride and he wants to derail the wedding. So, he passed on an anonymous note to him saying that his fiance has a wooden leg. Now you'd THINK this would not stop the wedding, but Charley is a jerk and runs...leaving the woman he loves at the alter. The rest of the film consists of Charley on his honeymoon without his bride...until he eventually comes to his senses!

This is a weird plot...really weird. This uniqueness is much of the reason I liked the short...and it's worth seeing. Among Charley Chase's best? No...but still quite enjoyable.

The beauty of Charley Chase's great great comedies of the mid-twenties -- MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE, CRAZY LIKE A FOX and this, HIS WOODEN WEDDING is that they are first, very funny and second, complete stories. A perfect little farce goes on in twenty minutes, instead of two or three hours. The stories make sense, if you assume the premises, the people do funny, funny things and the stories actually work.

Charley is about to get married, and his best man wants two things: Charley's bride and the heirloom diamond that Charley has given her as an engagement present. So he writes Charley an anonymous note that his bride has a wooden leg. Sounds stupid? Yes, well, it works, and several hilarious sequences ensue. It's twenty minutes of low comedy that will leave you gasping.