Cute Chase comedy starts with Charley getting his car stolen from in front of his girlfriend's house. He runs inside for help but her policeman father is in the bath tub! So he steals her father's cop uniform and gives runs after thief. Once caught the thief insists on going to jail (he wants food & shelter) so Charley grudgingly drags him there. Once in the police station Charlie is grabbed to go Keystone cops style after lunatic Larry, an escaped mental patient. When the first set of policemen get thrown out of the windows by the loon Charley is forced to out smart him. He dresses and disguises himself to look like the lunatic who he sees making faces into a mirror that is hanging on an inside door. With his look-a-like appearance Charley opens the door and mimics the crazy man pretending to be his reflection in the mirror. But the mentally disturbed criminal suspects something fishy and tries to out smart Charley
... In the end Chase rules and captures the criminal and his girlfriend's father gets the $1,000 reward because no one knew Charley's name but they did get his badge number!
5 Reviews
One of Charley's better Jimmy Jump films.
planktonrules28 August 2011
Warning: Spoilers
Like many of the Jimmy Jump films, this one is directed by Leo McCarey. It stars Charley Chase and later in the film you get to see Chase's real life brother (James Parrott) playing a crazy man.
Charley pretends to be a cop--using his girlfriend's father's uniform to convince a thief to stop and give back the stolen car. However, things snowball and the guy insists that he wants to be arrested and forces Chase to take him to jail. Once at the police station, Charley is then ordered to help a group of real cops to apprehend a crazed killer (Parrott). Not wanting to go to jail for imitating a policeman, Chase reluctantly goes along--but looks for every opportunity to escape. In a funny twist, every time he makes a getaway, he ends up back with the police. And, he accidentally volunteers to go inside and get the wanted maniac. To do so, he uses a fake mirror gag--the same one popularized by Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin and later the Marx Brothers. This was pretty easy to do since the two brothers looked pretty similar and the beard hid all the dissimilarities. In the end, despite it all, Charley is a hero--and his future father-in-law is thrilled. See this film and see exactly how. Well worth seeing.
By the way, if you care, Chaplin first did the gag in "The Floorwalker", Linder did the mirror bit in "Seven Years Bad Luck" and the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup" (also directed by Leo McCarey).
Charley pretends to be a cop--using his girlfriend's father's uniform to convince a thief to stop and give back the stolen car. However, things snowball and the guy insists that he wants to be arrested and forces Chase to take him to jail. Once at the police station, Charley is then ordered to help a group of real cops to apprehend a crazed killer (Parrott). Not wanting to go to jail for imitating a policeman, Chase reluctantly goes along--but looks for every opportunity to escape. In a funny twist, every time he makes a getaway, he ends up back with the police. And, he accidentally volunteers to go inside and get the wanted maniac. To do so, he uses a fake mirror gag--the same one popularized by Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin and later the Marx Brothers. This was pretty easy to do since the two brothers looked pretty similar and the beard hid all the dissimilarities. In the end, despite it all, Charley is a hero--and his future father-in-law is thrilled. See this film and see exactly how. Well worth seeing.
By the way, if you care, Chaplin first did the gag in "The Floorwalker", Linder did the mirror bit in "Seven Years Bad Luck" and the Marx Brothers in "Duck Soup" (also directed by Leo McCarey).
Pretty funny
hte-trasme8 December 2009
Charley Chase starred in a series of one-reel comedies as "Jimmie Jump" before his better-known series of twenty-minute two-reelers, and most of them were little comedy gems in miniature. This is one of the funniest of these. In a variation on a formula that would work often for Chase, farcical complications proceed from incredible circumstances, and here we have a beginning gag premise that is hilarious in its goofiness -- the problems caused by a thief who steals Jimmie's car (he removes the steering wheel as a precaution, but the thief has brought his own!) and insists that Jimmie prove it his his.
The brilliant conclusion to this is that he proceeds into the policeman father of his girlfriend to decide calmly how to deal with this criminal. So he's talked into stealing his uniform, and, by a series of uproariously logical-illogical events becomes entrusted with chasing a deliciously over-the-top maniac, played by Charley's brother Jimmy Parrot in a large false beard. This leads into an uproarious and artfully-realized iteration of the old "mirror routine" later reused by the film's distinguished comedy director Leo McCarey in the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup." It's as funny if not more here, with Charley pulling out an unbelievable array of different hats to match the ones Jimmy puts on.
This is a beautifully constructed comedy and full of absurd laughs fro start to finish. It might be remembered by film and comedy historians for its place in the lineage a very distinctive and enduring gag, but it very much deserves to be appreciated on all its own merits.
The brilliant conclusion to this is that he proceeds into the policeman father of his girlfriend to decide calmly how to deal with this criminal. So he's talked into stealing his uniform, and, by a series of uproariously logical-illogical events becomes entrusted with chasing a deliciously over-the-top maniac, played by Charley's brother Jimmy Parrot in a large false beard. This leads into an uproarious and artfully-realized iteration of the old "mirror routine" later reused by the film's distinguished comedy director Leo McCarey in the Marx Brothers' "Duck Soup." It's as funny if not more here, with Charley pulling out an unbelievable array of different hats to match the ones Jimmy puts on.
This is a beautifully constructed comedy and full of absurd laughs fro start to finish. It might be remembered by film and comedy historians for its place in the lineage a very distinctive and enduring gag, but it very much deserves to be appreciated on all its own merits.
Becoming Charley Chase
Michael_Elliott14 March 2010
Sittin' Pretty (1924)
*** (out of 4)
Hilarious short has Charley Chase back in his Jimmy Jump character. This time out Jimmy shows up at his girlfriend's house and removes his steering wheel only to have a thief show up with his own steering wheel. Jimmy put on his girlfriend's fathers cop outfit and goes after the thief but then gets mistaken for a real cop and is sent into the house where a psychotic killer is held up. This is another high mark in the Jimmy Jump series as we get one major laugh after another starting with the hilarious opening bit where the thief jumps out seconds after Jimmy exits his vehicle. The short only gets better as the thief then demands to be arrested and then things kick up another gear as Jimmy goes to capture the killer. Chase is really super here as he manages to use this simple routine and get plenty of laughs and one can't help but think this was an homage to his Keystone days as the action and police comedy certainly feels like the Keystone Cops (only a lot funnier here). Chase's brother and sometime director James Parrott plays the maniac and does a fine job as the two relatives do a great job together. It should also be noted that the mirror gag here was taken by McCarey to the Marx Brothers for DUCK SOUP and both scenes are shot pretty much the same way.
*** (out of 4)
Hilarious short has Charley Chase back in his Jimmy Jump character. This time out Jimmy shows up at his girlfriend's house and removes his steering wheel only to have a thief show up with his own steering wheel. Jimmy put on his girlfriend's fathers cop outfit and goes after the thief but then gets mistaken for a real cop and is sent into the house where a psychotic killer is held up. This is another high mark in the Jimmy Jump series as we get one major laugh after another starting with the hilarious opening bit where the thief jumps out seconds after Jimmy exits his vehicle. The short only gets better as the thief then demands to be arrested and then things kick up another gear as Jimmy goes to capture the killer. Chase is really super here as he manages to use this simple routine and get plenty of laughs and one can't help but think this was an homage to his Keystone days as the action and police comedy certainly feels like the Keystone Cops (only a lot funnier here). Chase's brother and sometime director James Parrott plays the maniac and does a fine job as the two relatives do a great job together. It should also be noted that the mirror gag here was taken by McCarey to the Marx Brothers for DUCK SOUP and both scenes are shot pretty much the same way.
Mirror, mirror
kekseksa5 April 2017
The famous "mirror gag" did not originate with Charley Chase and certainly not with Chaplin whose Floorwalker is only a rather vague allusion to it. It had been a vaudeville act by the Lyman brothers (twins) as early as 1900 in a review called A Merry Chase, is first (to my knowledge) included in a film by Alice Guy in His Double in 1912. It was revived as "the broken mirror" as a stage-act by the Schwartz Brothers in 1913 (possibly inspired by the Guy film) in a show called A Glimpse of the Great White Way, used cursorily (and without mirror) by Chaplin in The Floor Walker (1916)and by Harold Lloyd in The Marathon (1919).
Max Linder's use in Seven Years of Bad Luck (1921)is much more elaborate. The two persons either side of the mirror do not really resemble each other and the sequence is one part of a complex process of cause and effect that extends throughout the film.
McCarey's innovation here is the died that the mirror character impossibly copies the antics of the other, guessing each time what he will do. Here it is well done but a little rushed; the dame pattern would be repeated by McCarey in more leisurely (perhaps too leisurely) fashion in Duck Soup (1933).
Max Linder's use in Seven Years of Bad Luck (1921)is much more elaborate. The two persons either side of the mirror do not really resemble each other and the sequence is one part of a complex process of cause and effect that extends throughout the film.
McCarey's innovation here is the died that the mirror character impossibly copies the antics of the other, guessing each time what he will do. Here it is well done but a little rushed; the dame pattern would be repeated by McCarey in more leisurely (perhaps too leisurely) fashion in Duck Soup (1933).
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