A Ten-Minute Egg

This ten-minute (as revealed right in the title) one-reeler from Charley Chase's earlier Jimmy Jump series, and it's a funny little example of the kind of unlikely and embarrassing situation that Charley's comedy character could get himself into. The main premise for the comedy is the Jimmy discovers he can convince people he is a tough figure to be reckoned with merely by giving them a business card identifying him as the bouncer of the "Bucket of Blood Cafe." This and the encounter that leads to it are played out and timed well -- especially the moments when his business cards run out. Chase's reactions really make the scenes in which he marvels at his ability to transform into a tough guy with a mere business card. His characters don't always do the most moral things -- and he doesn't here -- but they always remain likable, partially, I think, because's he's doing things that in some sense we'd like to do but don't.

After he's forced to live up to the new toughness that he's created for himself the short turns into some very wacky and well-executed but also less characteristic chase and stunt-based material. The end doesn't really put the most memorable cap on it, but it's still a funny comedy. The best gag, I think, is the very macabre one in the very beginning. It hardly relates to the rest of the short but funny enough to be memorable highlight in itself.

Although he made his movie debut in 1914 and worked prolifically thereafter, Charley Chase's career as a star comedian really took off in the early 1920s when he coined the name "Jimmy Jump" and launched a series of one-reel comedies. In these brief episodes Chase explored the comic possibilities of an average guy's misadventures in a basically realistic, workaday world. That may not sound especially daring, but at the time most comedians still relied on outlandish costumes, cartoon-y gags and surreal, non-linear story lines. Jimmy Jump looked like the kind of guy you might work with at the office or hang out with at the club, and he made a perfectly credible husband and father. Charley wasn't the first to break away from the Sennett style and play the Average Man (Sidney Drew and Harold Lloyd, among others, were ahead of him) but he proved to be one of the best at this brand of comedy. The Jimmy Jump shorts, which were cranked out very quickly, maintain a remarkably high standard.

A Ten-Minute Egg is one of the most enjoyable entries in the series. At the top of the film Jimmy is established as an affable but rather wimpy guy, easily pushed around by bullies. So he has a business card printed up identifying him as the bouncer at the Barrel of Blood Café (great name!), and finds that he can come out on top in most situations by simply presenting the card. But when an evil con man attempts to cheat Jimmy's fiancée and her mother the card proves to be useless, and Jimmy has to summon up genuine courage and physical pluck to win the day.

There's nothing revolutionary about the premise, but using that simple framework Charley offers up a steady supply of fresh and funny gags. Unlike such contemporaries as Ben Turpin or Larry Semon, Chase wouldn't do just anything for a laugh; his comedy was based on situation and character, and for the most part it was grounded in reality, albeit an exaggerated and sometimes nightmarish reality. The threatening business card Jimmy presents whenever he encounters a hostile person in this film is a clever, "real world" comic idea. It reminded me of the talisman carried by Harold Lloyd in Grandma's Boy: it's a token of courage that turns out to be quite bogus, but it gives the possessor a sense of invulnerability that eventually seeps in and is acted upon at a crucial moment.

The climax of this short is beautifully filmed and edited, action-packed and genuinely suspenseful. A Ten-Minute Egg may not be the greatest short Chase ever made, but it stands with the best of his Jimmy Jump series, and the finale alone makes it well worth seeing more than once.

Ten-Minute Egg, A (1924)

*** (out of 4)

A step in the right direction for the Jimmy Jump series with Charley Chase. This time out Jimmy plays yet another coward but he finds a trick in giving people a fake card stating that he's the bouncer at the "Barrel of Blood Cafe". This here scares people out of wanting to fight him but soon the woman he's about to marry gets taken by a con man. This here turned out to be one of the better entries in the series as we get Chase turning in a good performance and the story itself isn't too bad even if it's not ground breaking. What works best here is once again Chase and his coward performance. He was always great at playing this type of character and he brings a lot of charm to the film as well as laughs when he's playing "tough" just because of this fake card. Jimmy gets himself into several situations of trying to fight people and the single joke works in each case. The end of the film turns into something we'd expect to see from Harold Lloyd as there are stunts dealing with Chase hanging over a cliff and another nice one where he must jump from a motorcycle onto the back of a truck.

Joseph Forte has just conned Ena Gregory and her mother out of their fortune with a phony oil well. In walks Charley Chase, pretending to be a tough guy by virtue of his business cards, and soon it's a chase comedy.

It's one of Chase's one-reel "Jimmy Jump" shorts, made when he was reintroducing himself to the movie audience after half a decade behind the screen. It's fast, it's furious, it's full of gags, and it has just a sketch of a plot, because for a real story, you had to go to two reels. Excellent for what it is.