Isn't Life Terrible?

Although slapstick heroes such as Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Laurel and Hardy remain household names even today, they were only the front runners among dozens of silent comics, most of whom are now forgotten. A lot of them of course weren't very good in the first place. You also get someone like Harry Langdon who is remembered better than he ought to be simply because he made feature-length movies, two of which were directed by Frank Capra. And then there is Charley Chase, who only ever made short comedies, never graduating onto features, and yet he was very popular in his day, and deserving of more recognition now. Isn't Life Terrible?, one of his finest two-reelers, demonstrates why.

Chase isn't one of the more athletic slapstick comics as Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd were. In fact, you can see a few of his "stunts" here are sewn up with camera trickery, such as when he leaps off his deckchair onto the ceiling. But Chase is a great reactor, a master of the brilliantly-timed double take. His horrified or bemused expressions are sometimes enough to make some of the more pedestrian gags laugh-out-loud funny. Unlike shy romantics Chaplin and Lloyd, Chase often played the put-upon family man, the kind of figure we now know very well from modern sitcoms but quite a rarity in silent comedy. Chase had the right demeanour for this niche, and the right capacity for consternation to make it funny. For this short, he is supported by a pre-"Laurel and Hardy" Oliver Hardy. The character Hardy plays is a workshy buffoon, a little different to his familiar persona but still one he can manage. One might expect him to upstage Chase, but he doesn't. And this isn't because Hardy is bad, it's just that Charley Chase is good enough to carry the picture himself.

A major contributing factor to Isn't Life Terrible? is that the director is Leo McCarey, later an Oscar winner for his dramas, but at this point a key man at the Hal Roach studios. McCarey's formula for comedy direction was often to push an idea to the point of absurdity. Take the opening scene, where Chase twice has a chicken thrown over his fence, twice throws it back, and then suddenly has about a dozen chickens come plopping over at once. This doesn't make much sense, and it's not even clear who's throwing the birds, but it's a funny bit of nonsense all the same. Like Chaplin, McCarey is often puts his characters in the background and has the chaos they cause in the foreground, such as when Chase hurls a suitcase on top of a car, only to have it crashing down on the other side, in front of the camera. Our distance from the players makes it look more like some street scene we have inadvertently witnessed, and much funnier as a result. And although the pace of Isn't Life Terrible? is quite fast, McCarey isn't afraid to let things play out slowly if needed, for example Chase and co.'s stunned response as their trunk is accidentally dumped in the sea.

The only major weak spot to Isn't Life Terrible? is its story and structure. The sudden switch half-way through from Charley selling fountain pens to taking his family on a cruise makes it look as if two separate story ideas have been awkwardly spliced. The linking device of Charley winning the cruise by selling the most pens doesn't makes sense because, as we are shown, he isn't a very good salesman. And it's important for comedy to be well-plotted. After all, Chaplin only really took off when he started developing his little sketches into meaningful comic stories. What saves Isn't Life Terrible? is that sense of the ridiculous that Chase and McCarey had, that ability to build funny business out of nothing very much. This was a real advantage of the Roach studios, where there wasn't some all-controlling writer-director-star, and everyone in the team was welcome to throw in their ideas. There are dozens of blink-and-miss-it sight gags to watch out for here, and although Chase lacks the spark of genius, not to mention the ambition of his better-known contemporaries, he is undoubtedly a professional comedian who knows how to keep us laughing.

Charley Chase fans will enjoy this silent two-reeler from his mid-'20s heyday, but viewers unfamiliar with his work should be aware that proper appreciation of this film will depend on one's taste for the Comedy of Escalating Frustration: i.e., the sort of comedy where the humor depends on everything --and I mean, absolutely everything-- going wrong. It takes a special kind of sensibility (combining empathy with just a touch of sadism) to chuckle while the comedian on screen suffers through the worst day of his life, but if you liked Buster Keaton's The Boat or Laurel & Hardy's Perfect Day, you'll probably get a kick out of this one as well.

Charley plays a middle-class guy with a wife, daughter, and a lazy brother-in-law with a bogus heart condition he constantly cites to avoid doing any heavy lifting. (The brother-in-law is played by a very youthful-looking Oliver Hardy, who has a number of good moments throughout.) Charley's the kind of guy who can't get any yard-work done without getting assailed by chickens, and can't even help a neighbor pack for a camping trip without the situation backfiring on him. At his wife's urging Charley signs up for a contest, seeing as how his own family is in serious need of a vacation: whoever sells the most pens wins a free trip to the Tabasco Islands. Charley's adventures as a door- to-door pen salesman begin at the foot of what appears to be the same flight of steps later used by Laurel & Hardy in Hats Off! and The Music Box, seen here only briefly. The highlight of the sequence comes when Charley attempts to sell a pen to an attractive young woman (17 year-old Fay Wray) but succeeds only in squirting himself in the face. Fay's barely-suppressed laughter appears to be quite genuine.

Charley somehow wins the contest, but the family's voyage is just as plagued with problems as their life on shore. At the dock their daughter gets separated from the group and --in a highly unlikely switch-- is replaced by an African American girl of similar size, wearing a large, floppy hat. Watching this sequence the first time I braced myself for unpleasant racial gags typical of the period, but the treatment of the black girl is quite benign; surprisingly, she is accepted as part of the family group, and even saves Charley from falling overboard. The ship itself is an old tub that barely survives the voyage, and the crew members we see inspire little confidence. There are lots of gags, some predictable (such as the inevitable seasickness bit) and others less so (such as the startling outcome of a struggle with the stuck dresser drawer in Charley's cabin). Somehow the ship reaches the Tabasco Islands, and the story climaxes with a bizarre, macabre closing bit that may remind viewers of the "freak" gags Laurel & Hardy would sometimes employ in later years to end their comedies.

In sum, while Isn't Life Terrible? may not be the best thing Charley Chase ever did, it's a pretty good example of his style that provides a number of laughs, a surprise or two, and other elements of interest for silent comedy buffs.

Isn't Life Terrible? (1925)

*** (out of 4)

Semi-spoof of D.W. Griffith's ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL basically just pokes fun at the title but we have Charley Chase playing the lovely husband who wins a cruise with his wife (Katherine Grant), child and the lazy brother-in-law (Oliver Hardy) but of course nothing goes as planned. This isn't Chase's best film but there are still enough laughs to get you to overlook a rather bizarre and long running joke. The second half of the film takes place on the ship and at the start of this is when the Chase family lose their own daughter and end up with a small black child. You'd think this would lead to the obvious jokes and it does but at the same time the rest of the film plays it straight as the family isn't worried about the missing child and just treat the new kid as their own. It's a little uneasy watching this entire "joke" but perhaps those in 1925 got a bigger kick out of it. A lot of the writing is rather lazy with the obvious jokes always being taken but there are still some funny moments. A lot of this has to do with Charley and his reaction to the lazy Hardy who always "has a spell" whenever it's time to do some work. The two men work well together and that alone makes this worth watching.

A consistent gimmick in American comedy films and cartoons is the practice of giving them titles that parody recent dramatic releases, even when there's no other similarity between the serious film and the comedy. Charley Chase's 1925 comedy "Isn't Life Terrible?" parodies the title of a D.W. Griffith drama from the previous year, "Isn't Life Wonderful?" ... but the two movies are otherwise dissimilar, with unrelated plots.

After some early unfunny gags involving Fay Wray and fountain pens, Charley prepares to embark on a cruise with his wife, their young daughter and his work-shy brother-in-law. The latter is played by Oliver Hardy without a moustache; regrettably, Hardy has very little to do in this movie and is given no chance to be really funny. The name of Hardy's character, Remington, is funnier than anything he does here.

Charley's little daughter (Mary Kornman) is about nine years old. Just before they board the ocean liner, Chase accidentally loses Mary and unknowingly acquires a little Negro girl about the same age (played by an uncredited child actress). There's an unpleasantly unfunny sequence in which Charley and his wife nonchalantly stroll the deck with (they think) their little daughter in tow, oblivious to the rude stares of busybodies wondering how this white couple have acquired a black daughter.

Oddly, after Chase and his wife embark with the black girl, their daughter Mary is left alone on the quay: she isn't with the black girl's parents, and they don't seem concerned with locating their own daughter. By omission, this movie manages to imply that black parents don't care about their own children as much as white parents do theirs.

I was very impressed with the personable acting of both the child actresses in this movie, making me regret that the black girl remains unidentified. She and Kornman are a couple of cute little charmers, and both of them wear fetching costumes. But the movie has a serious flaw. If this situation occurred in real life -- a child is left behind when her parents go on a trip, and another child is separated from her own parents -- the participants would be deeply concerned, and preoccupied with putting things right. In this movie, annoyingly, once Charley discovers he's got the wrong girl, he more or less treats this as a fait accompli and doesn't seem particularly concerned about Mary.

There are some gags that could have been quite funny, premised on the notion that the ocean liner is so decrepit it's literally falling apart. Charley leans on a bulkhead and it falls overboard, a lifebelt sinks, and so forth. These gags are well-done, but I kept expecting the characters to return to the problem of the swapped daughters ... which never really does become a major plot point in this ill-thought comedy. I was reminded of a similar situation in Buster Keaton's ocean-liner comedy 'The Navigator'. Keaton filmed an elaborate sequence (ultimately scrapped) that drew huge laughs from preview audiences when shown out of context as a preview trailer, but which wasn't funny when included in the complete movie ... because at that point in the story, Keaton's character had priorities that should have deterred him from this particular activity. Chase's character has a comparable conflict in "Isn't Life Terrible?", but doesn't confront it properly.

There's a brief but effective performance by Lon Poff as a "chips" (ship's carpenter) who looks like Death warmed over. I would have rated this movie about 2 points out of 10, but I'll give it an extra point -- 3 in 10 -- for the charming screen presences and acting talents of the two child actresses seen here. Don't expect to laugh much during "Isn't Life Terrible?".

Called one of the most handsomest directors in Hollywood, Leo McCarey directed some of cinema's funniest films. Winner of three Oscars, McCarey has been credited (although producer Hal Roach would disagree) of linking Oliver Hardy with Stan Laurel as a team. What cannot be refuted is the director made a litany of silent movies' top-rated hilarious movies with veteran comedian Charley Chase.

A perfect example is McCarey's parody of a D. W. Griffith recent 1924 film, "Isn't Life Wonderful," with his two-reeler, July 1925's "Isn't Life Terrible." He was hired by Hal Roach in 1923 after the producer noticed his sense of humor while the two were playing on the handball court. McCarey was employed as a gag writer for the "Our Gang" series before directing Charlie Chase in his early 1924's 'Young Oldfield." The 26-year-old director soaked in the experienced advice of Chase, commenting "Whatever success I have had or may have, I owe to his help because he taught me all I know." The two had an especially close relationship by sharing the same hobby of writing popular songs together.

"Isn't Life Terrible" stars Oliver Hardy as the loafing brother of Chase's wife (Katherine Grant). Infected with the traveling bug, Chase decides to enter a contest for a free cruise by selling fountain pens. In one scene, Chase tries to persuade a housewife to buy a pen, which is stuck in his shirt pocket. Squeezing the pen to get it out, Chase splatters his face by the squirting ink. Fay Wray, the potential customer, isn't yelling hysterically in the scene like she will in 1933's 'King Kong.' Wray was one of many young actresses who won a newspaper contest to get her start in Hollywood, landing a small role in 1923 as a 16-year-older. Wray played several small parts, such as in "Isn't Life Terrible," until securing a female lead in Erich von Stroheim's "The Wedding March" in 1926.

Chase had been in films for 10 years by the time he appeared in "Isn't Life Terrible." Working at Keystone Studios, Chase appeared alongside Charlie Chaplin. He also as was a director for Roach in 1920. He supervised several Roach's film series, including "Our Gang." When Harold Lloyd left the Roach fold, Chase returned to the front of the camera to star in his very own successful series of comedies. He's still remembered today as a master of embarrassment, caught in situations where his calm demeanor can be raddled, such as seen in "Isn't Life Terrible" by bringing aboard the cruise boat the wrong child while his young daughter is left at the dock.