The Rent Jumpers

A low comedy number of very ordinary quality. Most of the scenes occur in a boarding house. The landlord runs around minus his trousers; there is the usual rivalry over the girl. The humor of this is not very strong. - The Moving Picture World, April 24, 1915

Once you've seen this Keystone comedy you'll understand why the working title for the project was "Mixed Pants Story." The plot is driven by the confusion that results when two pairs of trousers are mixed up. One pair is owned by the landlord of an apartment building and the other by one of his lodgers. The lodger also has a wallet that contains rent money except when it doesn't, and the wallet passes from one pair of trousers to the other at unexpected moments. But neither the landlord nor the owner of the wallet are the central figures here, for The Rent Jumpers is primarily a love story between the landlord's daughter, played by the ever popular Mae Busch, and the lodger's roommate, young Charley Chase.

Mae and Charley are best remembered by comedy buffs for their work at the Hal Roach Studio in the '20s and '30s, but in this earlier period they appeared together a number of times for Mack Sennett at Keystone. And oddly enough, in all their years at Roach later on they never worked together. (They play siblings in Laurel & Hardy's Sons of the Desert but don't appear in the same scene.) There's probably a story behind that, but most likely we'll never know what it was. In any case, Mae and Charley are usually paired off romantically in their Sennett comedies and make a nice couple.

This short is rather tame by Sennett standards. Pleasant, and amusing at times, but tame. Fritz Schade, who plays Charley's roommate, sports a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and camps it up a little, but generally speaking the performances are restrained. There are no explosions, food fights, or Kops racing across rooftops. When the trouser mix-up occurs at the lodging house there's a brief taste of Keystone chaos in the hallways, and things get a bit lively later on at a restaurant when Charley and Mae can't pay their bill, but even so this is not exactly what we expect from Keystone's output of the period. (That said, there's a nice surreal moment, very typical of the studio style, when Charley flings a pair of trousers over a transom and they wrap themselves neatly around a woman's neck.) Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Rent Jumpers is that it plays like a dress rehearsal of sorts for the comedies Charley and Mae made at Roach later on, where the performers usually look like real people instead of cartoon characters, the pace is slowed, and the humor is a little more, dare I say, sophisticated. Meanwhile, this film feels like a 1915 Keystone that aspires to be a 1926 Roach.

Leo McCarey gets a lot of credit for inventing the formula that would bring Charley Chase his success in film comedy, and there is no real way of knowing how much influence Charley Chase would have been able to have on the story of an early Keystone short such as this, but it is certainly temping to assume a lot of the successful humor here comes from Chase's particular comic mind.

The feel of the film, in fact, is like a cross between a characteristic later Chase film where the mad situations grow from the humiliating situations in which Charley fights to maintain his last shreds of dignity, and a fairly typical madcap Keystone comedy of people being suddenly undressed and losing their clothes. The comedy situation itself, in which Charley steals (something not quite so congruent with the later Charley Chase) an empty wallet and therefore cannot pay for his expensive date, is more prominent in the second half of the film, and works quite well, though not as well as plots of its kind would for the star in the future. In fact, it recalls a very embryonic version of the later and, to be fair, far superior "Manhattan Monkey Business." Chase himself overplays less than he did earlier in this Keystone series, though he retains some of the milquetoast, petulant expressions that don't necessarily work the best for him. He's also characteristically charismatic, though, and is developing some of his trademark flourishes. There's a wonderful moment where makes show of mock gallantry before accidentally pulling a pair of panty-hose out of his pocket that wouldn't have worked nearly so well with other comics. Those panty-hose are a great running gag that provide some of the best laughs in the movie -- also wouldn't seem out of place in one of Chase's own later comedies.

Overall quite a nice and funny one-reeler that is extra interesting for its glimpse of the very early work of Charley Chase and perhaps the beginnings of his great comedies of the twenties.

Rent Jumpers, The (1915)

*** (out of 4)

Charley Chase plays a man who steals his roommates (Fritz Schade) money-rich wallet and takes his girlfriend (Mae Busch) out for a night of fancy dining. After dinner the man realizes that he's stolen the wrong wallet and this one here is empty. Here's another winner from Keystone and once again they take a story that we've seen before (even in 1915) and they do wonders with it thanks to a great cast and some perfect comedy timing. Chase is at the top of his (early) game here and really delivers a funny performance especially in some early scenes where he's trying to get around his girlfriend's father who obviously doesn't like him. He also has some great chemistry with Schade and their early banter in their apartment is very good and it works later on in the film as well. Schade gets to display some of his physical humor as well with a slip into the bathtub. Busch also comes across very well here as she does a good job playing the silly daughter who finds herself in a jam. For the most part the humor comes from the actors timing to all the situations and we get plenty of good laughs. One of the highlights of the film happens when Schade bursts in on the dinner trying to find his wallet not knowing of the mistake that has been made.