Rattling Romeo

Towards the end of his career, Hal Roach decided that his small studio should stop making comedy shorts and concentrate on B-movies. Soon, all the studio regulars like Laurel & Hardy, Our Gang and Charley Chase were out looking for jobs with other studios. In the case of Laurel & Hardy, their post-Roach films weren't very good but they made them a lot of money. The Our Gang kids found a home with MGM and Charley Chase made some relatively benign but mediocre shorts for Columbia. "Rattling Romeo" is one of these Columbia shorts and it's now available in volume one of a two-part DVD series.

This film finds Charley's girlfriend nagging him to buy a car. However, he needs a raise to do this. Just then, out of the blue, he learns he's won a contest--and has enough for a used car. Some slick car salesmen convince Charley to buy a horrible car and soon the thing is falling to pieces. Then, when he refuses to keep making payments, they try to repossess the pile of junk.

Apart from an ending that seemed contrived, this is an amiable little short. No belly laughs and the falling apart gags could have been better, but you will enjoy it and the film is worth seeing as an example of one of the better Columbia shorts he made.

Amazingly, only a year later, Charley would be dead--due to a heart attack brought on, most likely, from his very heavy drinking. He was only 46--and he was, unfortunately, soon forgotten.

I enjoyed this Chase short, probably because I am a car gal! While not as good as his silent work, there are some cute gags and I'm sure plenty of people during The Depression understood the jokes regarding "accessories" and, of course, "the collection man". It's a shame the scenes on the trolley weren't all filmed on a real one. But this WAS Columbia, after all... Enjoyable, especially compared to other Chase shorts from 1939.

Although Charley Chase's Columbia shorts lack the polish of his work at Roach -- there is a lot more process photography here than in his heyday -- his collaborations with Del Lord were evolving towards their own particular pacing.

In this one they do a Del Lord specialty: Lord had stated out as a stunt driver for Keystone and stepped up to directing automobile comedies for Sennett, including a Taxi series, which he replicated briefly at Roach for the Taxi Boys. Following a brief retirement -- during which, believe it or not, he sold cars -- he wound up in the Columbia shorts department.

In this one, Charley has bought a junker of a car, which continually falls to pieces, in order to impress Ann Doran. The gags are well executed and actually work as punctuation to each sequence. It's a little too emphatic, but by the time the two did SOUTH OF THE BOUDOIR with its plate-crashing sequence, they had managed to finesse the pacing into something excellent.

Perhaps this might have gone some place, but Chase's health was in decline and he would be dead within a year of this short. We will never know.

The net result is a good comedy -- Chase seems to have been incapable of turning out a bad one -- but nothing that would impress anyone not already familiar with his work