Le Piège à rats

If you've ever wondered what the cartoons of Bob Clampett or Tex Avery might have looked like if they'd featured actual people instead of animals who talk and act like lunatics, you should take a look at some of Charley Chase's early one-reel comedies, the ones made when he was still known as "Jimmy Jump." They vary in quality of course, but the best of them have an engagingly crazy atmosphere, very cartoon-like, and the ten-minute running time feels exactly right. Like most of his contemporaries Chase came to realize eventually that longer films would call for more realism in the plotting, but when they were making these one-reel shorts Charley and his crew would throw in any gag that struck their fancy, no matter how odd, macabre, or off-the-wall it might be, and when ten minutes were up, they'd stop.

Case in point: The Rat's Knuckles, one of the most enjoyable of the Jimmy Jumps I've seen. Here Charley plays the inventor of a humane mousetrap, convinced it will mean his fortune. Jimmy (i.e. Charley) boasts of his idea to anyone who will listen, although, significantly, the demonstration of the device is saved for the final scene. When he romances his girlfriend (played by the adorable Martha Sleeper) he waxes eloquent about the riches they will share when she is his wife, living in luxury in their stately mansion built by his mousetrap profits. This fantasy sequence is the highlight: Professor James Jump and his Missus, dressed to the nines, step grandly outside their mansion, where the path is lined with newsreel cameramen who eagerly record their every move. The front lawn is decorated with an enormous plaster mouse sculpture; Jimmy's gold-headed cane has a handle in the shape of a mouse; and on his wife's face is a mouse-shaped beauty mark. During this scene I found myself thinking of Walt Disney, the man whose fortune actually was attributable to a mouse, or at least, to a mouse-inspired act of creativity, although this film was made several years before the birth of Mickey.

In any event, reality intervenes, and Jimmy finds to his dismay that the gentleman at the patent office isn't as impressed with his ingenuity as he'd anticipated. When we finally see the device demonstrated we understand why, although I feel Jimmy deserves brownie points for thinking outside the box. The ending of this short is startlingly abrupt, and startlingly funny, but not the sort of thing Chase would use later on. Like the entire film, the finale has a breezy, what-the-hell quality that is amusing and wears well after all these years. The Rat's Knuckles was created to amuse viewers for ten minutes or so, and that's exactly what it accomplishes.

The Rat's Knuckles, a short from early in Charley Chase's career when he was starring in one-reel comedies as "Jimmie Jump" veers off from his usual style of working in heavy elements of comedy of embarrassment, and seems to delve right into the realm of surrealism. Charley is the inventor of "The Humane Mousetrap" and eager to impress his girlfriend "Flirty" McFickle (whose character is ever to subtly hinted at in her name) and make it big. This leads us into a wild fantasy sequence that takes up about a third or more of the film with flights of fantasy and mockery of the rich celebrity impresario type that that Jimmie wants to be.

Martha Sleeper, as Jimmie's girlfriend, gets a couple of great comedy sequences all to herself and she does extremely well with them, as well as having great comedy chemistry with Charley himself. She's adorable and a perfect leading lady in these shorts.

The rest of the film meanders us through a no less dreamlike sequence of very funny scenes that follow from Jimmie's invention. As he shows it to a financing agency we get the brilliant double gag of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" on Jimmy's business card, then later the sight of that line being the only thing that actually stops the financier from shooting him right in the office.

In the end, after Jimmy discover Flirty's shocking true and and has had his invention rejected and so has of course decided to commit suicide, there is another wonderful pair of jokes that I won't wherein we discover how the humane mousetrap actually works, and see a passing good Samaritan's reaction to it.

It's hard to describe this film; unlike most of Chase's it seems to exist in a bizarre surrealistic dreamworld where men carry obedient mice in their pockets, streetlights fall over at a touch, and whole restaurants jump simultaneously at the sight of a rat. Most importantly it is hilarious through and through and bursting with creative comic energy.

Rat's Knuckles, The (1925)

** (out of 4)

Jimmy Jump invents a humane mouse trap that he plans on selling so that he and the girlfriend (Martha Sleeper) can become millionaires. This is a pretty disappointing entry in the Charley Chase series for a number of reasons. The biggest one is that the screenplay is incredibly weak without very many jokes. It's not that there are a lot of jokes that simply don't work. It's worse because there just aren't many jokes that are even attempted for. The first portion of the film deals with a fantasy sequence with Chase and Sleeper acting rich and posing for a variety of pictures. There are a couple marginal laughs to be had with this sequence as they're obviously spoofing rich folks who do good things just for the cameras. After this things get too weak as we see Chase trying to sell this trap, which eventually leads to us getting to see how the thing actually works. At 9-minutes the thing moves along well enough but just don't expect very many laughs. Certainly one of the weaker entries in the series.