Forgotten Sweeties

This Charley Chase short comedy from Hal Roach was the last of the films I watched on the "American Slapstick" DVD collection. In the one, Chase lives across on the same apartment floor as his old sweetheart but they just found out about that and their spouses are none too thrilled about it! By the way, Anita Garvin-known to me usually as a Laurel and Hardy foil-plays Chase's wife. I'll just stop there and just say how consistently funny most of the short is especially near the end when Charley paints faces on his feet! (Watch it if you're curious to what I'm referring to.) The director was James Parrott, Chase's brother. So on that note, I highly recommend Forgotten Sweeties.

This is a lesser but still very amusing short from Charley Chase's peak period: an ex-girlfriend of Charley's moves into his building with a new husband, and neither Charley's wife nor the new husband are happy with the situation.

Modern viewers might be confused by some of the 1920s dialogue ("I haven't seen you since Heck was a wienie" may need to be explained (see below) and there's a tremendous amount of sexual symbolism involving feet, socks and garters that don't add much to the usual visceral humor, even if they work together well for ex-lit majors like me.

As for the confusing bit of dialogue quoted above, there is a phrase "A dog's age" for a long time. This gave rise to "since Hector was a pup" and since frankfurters are sometimes called "hot dogs" and sometimes "wienies" (from Vienna sausages) and thus this particular bit of snappy dialogue.

As already said, amusing if not Chase's best. Don't start your friends on this one, but if they like his silent comedies, give it a well deserved shot.