The Lighter That Failed

Charley Chase is pleased to get a cigarette lighter as a birthday present. "It's the only kind that works," he says. Except it doesn't. The rest of the movie consists of his futile efforts to get it working.... and disaster when he does.

That's a mark of Chase's genius, his ability to take a small, simple situation and build a solid twenty minutes of laughs out of it. He faces oversized screwdrivers, unhelpful relatives, and instructions on using the lighter that seem to require eggs and butter.

It's one of the poorly preserved shorts that Chase made under Roach's contract with MGM that seemed for many years to be lost. The copy that survives has a couple of small sequences that are covered by descriptive titles. It's unfortunate they are missing, but what's left is very funny.