User Reviews

From the opening sequence to the final fade-out, Too Many Mammas is a great little short. Charley Chase provides a solid reel's worth of skillfully executed physical comedy, precisely coordinated farcical mix-ups, and clever gags. Charley plays the lead role, but he's assisted in a big way by Martha Sleeper, Noah Young, and other familiar members of the Hal Roach stock company. I think this effort ranks with the very best of the one-reel comedies Chase crafted when his screen character was still known as "Jimmy Jump." For that matter, Too Many Mammas packs as many laughs as some of Charley's superb two-reel classics from his 1925-29 heyday.

Charley, or Jimmy rather, works in an office where it seems almost everyone is having an affair, illicit or otherwise, despite the admonition on the wall: Business Before Pleasure. The film kicks off with a touch of sci-fi: a futuristic telephone installed in the office permits callers to see the person they're speaking with, and vice versa. (Hmm . . . I wonder if those things will ever catch on?) Thus when the boss receives a call from his mistress (played by the sexy Olive Borden) phoning naked from her bathtub, she is quite visible to the highly embarrassed Jimmy when he takes the phone. Pleasant as it may be, however, this prehistoric version of Skype turns out to be a red herring where our story is concerned. The plot proper gets under way when the boss invites his girlfriend to a café called The Humming Bird, and compels Jimmy to come along as his "beard," just in case word gets back to his wife. Consequently Jimmy feels obligated to lie to his own girlfriend and tell her he can't take her to the theater because he has to go to a directors' meeting. Now the ground is prepared for both Jimmy and his boss to get into plenty of trouble with their respective partners before the evening is out.

The rest of the film takes place at the Humming Bird, which appears to be quite a swinging joint. This is where we meet Martha Sleeper, who makes a strong impression as a hardboiled Apache dancer who is moved when Jimmy attempts to come to her "rescue," and returns the favor later on. It's a highlight when Jimmy is forced to masquerade as Martha's dance partner to allay the suspicions of her tough husband; Chase was often at his best in comic dance sequences, and this one is a particular treat. Eventually, the boss's wife arrives, followed by Jimmy's girlfriend -- accompanied by her tough brother, a bootlegger -- and things really start to cook.

Chase sets up his situation so briskly, and packs so many laughs into such a brief running time, it's hard to believe this short is over in less than ten minutes. One gag in particular, involving red-hot mama Olive Borden as an obliging human prop, is hilarious and worth the price of admission in itself. As a viewer of the day might have said, Too Many Mammas is a pip!

In the 1990s it seemed to be all the rage to predict that soon enough technology would evolve that wold make the videophone household technology which would replace the traditional telephone in society. Of course, now most people have such technology at their fingertips with the advent of the webcam, but it's still not ubiquitous because, one might think obviously, sometimes people want to make phone calls when not quite dressed. The short opens with a funny gag that's a a funny take on this, in the classic style of Charley Chase's frequent fanciful science-fiction premises that lead to very practical social punchlines, based on a fun 1924 version of the videophone that shows its been in the public consciousness for quite some time.

This one reeler is from earlier in Charley Chase's career, and it rally shows him and director hitting their stride in the creation of a new style of film comedy within astonishing ten-minute constraints. It's quite brilliant in that sense and extremely funny. The real central premise is that Charley's boss is cheating on his wife, and wants Charley to accompany them to the night club as an alibi. Hilariously, EVERYBODY'S spouse eventually shows up, and a complex networked gag sequence develops wonderfully.

Now, the old tropes of a man trying to cheat and being discovered, or not cheating and accidentally placing himself in a situation in which he seems to be, are real canards. But by taking that comedy staple and turning it into a reductio ad absurdum, methodically developing a situation where this occurs to about seven people at once, Charley Chase brings it to a whole new level of comedy. In a sense, what Laurel and Hardy did to make the pie fight funny again in their short "The Battle of the Century" -- in which the fight slowly grows to involve an entire street and thousands of pies -- Chase does for the caught-cheating gag in "Too Many Mammas." There's also a great sequence of Charley having to dance in which, rather unusually, the humor comes less from situation than from the pure sight gag comedy of watching the gawky Charley improvise a hot jazz dance.

This short is not only very funny, but also a quintessential film in defining Chase's and Leo McCarey's comedy styles.

One of the rarer of the Charley Chase movies, this is from his 'Jimmie Jump' period of one-reelers. He had already picked up Leo McCarey as director -- co-director, because Chase pretty much ran his own unit at Roach, having started as director-general and worked himself up to series star, so to speak.

Anyway, in this one, Charley is called upon to go out with his boss on a date with the boss' mistress, to act as a beard. Although many of Chase's one-reelers were loosely-plotted with plenty of room for gags, this one is very tightly packed, the gags advance the plot and the whole short turns into something that actually has something to say. An undiscovered gem from before Chase's peak period, it should be more widely available -- but then, all of his films should be.

The plot for this short is pretty typical of the Prohibition era... the married boss has a bit of fluff on the side that he needs another man to help cover for while out for drinks and fun. Charley is, of course, the other man. Next thing you know, there are multiple husbands and wives trying to convince their spouses everything is on the level.

At one point in the film Chase pretends to be a girl's dancing partner in order to keep her husband from getting suspicious after seeing them together. Chase's dancing is the opposite of what he was capable of in real life, and peps up the middle of the film.

An interesting hint of things to come... Charley answering a telephone with a built in screen!

Too Many Mammas (1924)

*** (out of 4)

Another nice entry in Hal Roach's Jimmy Jump series finds him going out to dinner with his boss and his mistress but soon the boss's wife shows up so Jimmy must pretend to be with the mistress. Things get a bit trickier when Jimmy's girlfriend shows up. This is yet another major plus in the series has Charley Chase is in top form delivering one great laugh after another. The entire sequence of the two men trying to juggle three women at the same table is pretty priceless and McCarey's direction is top-notch in pulling this off. Even before this sequence we get another good one where Jimmy walks into the tough bar to check things out and then starts a fight thinking a woman is getting abused but not realizing it was just the dance she was going. The short runs just under 9-minutes but there's really not a wasted moment. Another funny gag includes the "telephone of the future", which allows one to see the person they're talking to.

Charley's boss insists that Charley come along with him. After all, the boss is stepping out with a woman and he's married and wants Charley along to provide cover. So, if they are caught, the wife will think the young woman is Charley's girl. Once there, he gets pulled into an attempt by a lady to make her husband (Noah Young) jealous. And, when the wife AND Charley's girlfriend arrive, things really heat up.

This one surprised me. Currenly it has a VERY high rating of 8.9--which would seem to indicate it's a brilliantly made film. However, it's just average--with a few funny moments and LOTS of dangling plot elements. Perhaps I wasn't seeing what those others saw in this film.