There It Is

This funny, wacky Charley Bowers comedy combines plenty of absurdist material with Bowers's trademark visual effects, along with plenty of sight gags and puns, to create an unusual and very entertaining short feature. As in so many of the short films that Bowers made, it has an odd kind of internal logic all its own, for all that it is completely off the wall and unpredictable.

Bowers plays a detective, sent to investigate the 'Fuzz-Faced Phantom', who is a wonderfully goofy concept. Aside from Bowers and the Phantom (played by Buster Brodie), most of the other characters have to play it straight and endure a series of indignities – that is, except for Charley's amusing assistant MacGregor, another imaginative conception that has to be seen to be appreciated.

Bowers squeezes quite a bit out of the material, and it keeps up an enjoyably manic pace for the entire running time, until it winds up the story and the case in an amusing way that seems entirely appropriate.

When a mysterious figure appears to cause a series of disruptions at the Frisbie Home in New York, word goes out to Scotland Yard that the Fuzz-Faced Phantom is at work. Soon, Charley MacNeesha and his assistant MacGregor are sent across the ocean to investigate. But even as they arrive at the home, a new series of weird events begins: full-grown chickens hatch from eggs, pots float across rooms, and pants dance of their own volition.

Charles Bowers was forgotten for decades and his name was notably absent from most histories of the Silent Era... and how is that possible? Once you have seen this film, you will instantly put it up there with all the silent greats: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Lloyd... maybe his output was smaller (I don't know), but this one film alone is an incredible mash of surrealistic weirdness and stop-motion chicanery. I can't think of anything else in the era that even comes close.

In this rare silent, Bowers plays a Scottish detective who is assigned to capture a "fuzz-faced phantom" who "haunts" a house.

The special effects, especially the stop-motion segments, are truly revolutionary and creative (in one scene, an egg hatches into a full-grown chicken right before your eyes!). And, the "phantom" does some pretty weird things, via special effects.

Bowers was a film "genius" and, in my opinion, far surpasses George Melies, and others.

I have MOST of this film, but not the entire film. If anyone has it (or other Bowers films), I would LOVE to purchase copies of them.

Thank you! Norm

I saw this on TCM.I like good silent comedies, but this is definitely not one of them.It just seemed stupid rather than funny.Naming a ship coming from Scotland the "SS Hoot Mon" is painfully idiotic rather than humorous.Some people can tell even the corniest jokes and make them seem funny;other people just sound boring and tedious. This was definitely the latter. Made you wish for the Three Stooges. Amazing how much trouble someone want to and ended up with nothing.I thought that this would be a very useful tool to show to a film class in college to demonstrate that making a GOOD slapstick film is no where near as easy as it may seem.

If you've never seen Charley Bowers before, here's a great place to start an acquaintance: of all his surviving works, There It Is stands as the fastest, funniest, and most outlandish. Most of Bowers' movies feature impressive stop-motion animation and bizarre special effects, sometimes presented as dream sequences or brief fantasy interludes, but in this film the madness is unconfined, and in the end there's only a half-hearted attempt to explain it all away. From the opening shot There It Is is jam-packed with frightening-yet-funny imagery suggestive of the early "trick films" of Georges Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca, but it also prefigures the more self-conscious, provocative Avant-Gard surrealism of Luis Buñuel, Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau. Unlike the latter filmmakers I don't believe Bowers was especially interested in shocking the bourgeoisie, and yet I get the sense he wasn't just playing for laughs, either. The work of Charley Bowers is funny, but it's funny in a way that startles and disturbs the viewer, and although you may laugh you may also feel a little uneasy.

At any rate, this superlative essay in weirdness is set (or so we're told) at "the mysterious Frisbee home," where serenity has been shattered by a series of strange occurrences. The cook cracks open an egg from which a fully-grown chicken emerges; the butler sees a pair of trousers dancing atop his dresser; and strangest of all, the Fuzz-Faced Phantom makes frequent, inexplicable appearances-- sometimes on wheels --carrying such items as a hat-rack, a broom, a rifle, boxing gloves, or a chunk of ice. The objects aren't strange in themselves, but the phantom himself is an alarming piece of work. The vexed family calls Scotland Yard to investigate. I was delighted to find that, here anyway, Scotland Yard consists of a small yard where the detectives are kilted Scotsmen who march in a tight circle playing bagpipes. (This is Scotland Yard as my inner six year-old wants it to be.) Summoned to the Frisbee home, our hero brings along his assistant, a bug named MacGregor who lives in a match-box. Of course, MacGregor must first retrieve his toothbrush, which is considerably bigger than he is.

Just when you're thinking the tone is on the verge of turning cutesy, however, Charley arrives at the Frisbee home and all hell breaks loose. Or, to be more precise, wild cartoon-like gags are unleashed at a rapid-fire tempo. Paintings come alive within their frames, a child's wagon vanishes through the wall, the cuckoo clock is invaded by a cat (who takes over the cuckoo's job), the telephone rises into the air and turns rubbery, and through it all the Phantom's entrances and exits accelerate. Charley goes to bed and wakes up dangling over the bathtub. MacGregor the animated bug is practically reduced to playing straight man in this setting. At the finale, an "explanation" is offered for some of these phenomena but it doesn't explain a thing, and we don't care: this freaky experience has been entirely too much fun for explanations.

There It Is has recently become available as part of a DVD box set called "More Treasures from American Film Archives." It's a terrific set, and this comedy is one of several gems in the collection. All of Charley Bowers' other surviving movies have been collected and made available in a two-disc set called "Charley Bowers: The Discovery of an American Comic Genius." The over all quality level of Bowers' work is somewhat erratic, but the best of his comedies (such as Now You Tell One and It's a Bird) are delightful, and this film definitely ranks with his most accomplished efforts.