Before securing a place for himself as director of such beloved comedies as An Affair to Remember (1957) and Going My Way (1944), Leo McCarey earned his chops as a writer and director of slapstick shorts for the Hal Roach Studios. The pace of slapstick was notoriously fast, as was the pace of production. Filmmakers struggled to keep up with the market's demand for comedy, while experimenting with the art form to find the magic combination that could make one of their performers an icon of the genre, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, or Harold Lloyd.

While at Roach, McCarey had a particularly fruitful collaboration with Charley Chase, and was instrumental in refining Chase's on-screen persona. A comic everyman who might best be described as a more mature, mustachioed Harold Lloyd, Chase alternated between playing eligible bachelors and hen-pecked husbands. One of these formative works was Be Your Age (1926).

In Be Your Age, a greedy lawyer named Blaylock (Frank Brownlee) is eager to swindle the widow Schwartzkopple (Lillian Leighton) out of her vast fortune. When she expresses an interest in younger men, Blaylock enlists the services of his bashful clerk, Charley (Chase). According to one intertitle, "The boldest thing he ever did was whistle out loud in a public park." Desperately in need of cash to send home to his family, Charley allows himself to be drawn into Blaylock's plot and the clumsy courtship begins. While attending a party at Mrs. Schwartzkopple's, he meets her disapproving son, Oswald (Oliver Hardy). Every potentially romantic moment -- in the garden (where Blaylock encourages Charley to "Pull the Romeo stuff") and on the dance floor (where Chase poses as a Spanish lady) -- all devolve into comic mayhem, perhaps because the woman Charley really loves is Mrs. Schwartzkopple's young secretary (Gladys Hulette).

Born Charles Joseph Parrott in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1893, Chase began his show biz career as a vaudevillian, moving west in 1912. He first found work at Universal Studios but, as did so many entertainers of his ilk, he ended up at the Keystone Studios. There, producer/director Mack Sennett allowed him to begin developing a personal comic style. At the same time, he learned more about the filmmaking process by becoming a director (under his birth name, Charles Parrott). Chase spent about six years at Keystone before accepting a position at the Hal Roach Studios.

For slapstick aficionados, one of the most fascinating things to watch is an actor's quest for a comic persona. It was largely discovered through trial and error. By watching a performer's lesser-known films, one sees them undergo name changes, brief pairings with other actors, and sometimes radical shifts in comic identity.

For example, in Be Your Age, one finds 38-year-old Oliver Hardy before he became irrevocably associated with Stan Laurel. The Georgia-born Hardy was, like Chase, "finding himself" on the Roach lot, working mostly as director but also seeking the magic combination that would allow for a long-running cinematic franchise and, just maybe, screen immortality. Hardy occasionally shared screen time with Laurel in the mid 1920s, but it was McCarey who consciously put them together as a team. By 1928's From Soup to Nuts (co-written by McCarey and directed by Edgar Kennedy), the classic Laurel and Hardy formula had begun to emerge.

When he first signed on with Hal Roach, Chase was primarily working as director, occasionally appearing in films, yet still unable to find his comedic niche. But sometimes it takes an outside opinion to clearly discern one's talents. When Harold Lloyd left the studio in 1923, Roach began grooming Chase to become his replacement. McCarey recognized Chase's strengths, and understood Lloyd's appeal, and began shaping Chase into a character that was similar to Lloyd yet not derivative. For a time, the new character was called Jimmy Jump. But once the persona was fully formed, Charley Chase was simply... Charley Chase.

Chase enjoyed a lengthy and prosperous career in comedy shorts, extending well into the 1930s. According to Leonard Maltin's book Selected Short Subjects, "McCarey and Chase worked together on each comedy in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere and produced some of the best silent comedies ever made -- films like Bad Boy (1925), His Wooden Wedding (1925), Dog Shy (1926), Mighty Like a Moose (1926), etc. They established the Chase character: a dapper, basically intelligent but incredibly naive young man who inevitably found himself in some outlandish circumstances through no fault of his own."

Although slapstick fell out of fashion once the talkies took over Hollywood, Chase was among the few veterans of the genre to continue to work -- with consistent success -- through the 1930s, due in part to his pleasant singing voice. Yet Chase never was welcomed into the pantheon of slapstick greats. Actor Billy Gilbert, who was a close friend and occasional co-star with Chase, remembered, "He was a sweet, sad man who felt among other things that his talent was not fully appreciated. He wasn't bitter about it, he just wondered why people didn't rank him with Laurel and Hardy, Keaton, Chaplin, and Lloyd. He knew his style of comedy was more sophisticated than theirs, but he felt that there was an audience for him, too. I think he was ahead of his time."

Contemplating why a comedian of Chase's talent should not be better remembered, Maltin points out that Chase never made a strong effort at features, only shorts. Maltin paraphrases Stan Laurel, who worked with Chase at Roach: "[Chase] never aimed for higher things, he was a king of his domain -- the two-reel comedy."

Chase became increasingly dependent on alcohol in his later years. Gilbert recalled, "He told me that if he couldn't drink, he didn't want to live." Chase died as a result of a heart attack on June 20, 1940.

Unlike Chase, McCarey did not limit himself to one area of expertise. Even within the realm of comedy, he transitioned from silent slapstick to the madcap talkies of the Marx Brothers (Duck Soup [1933]), the feel-good comedy (The Bells of St. Mary's [1945], starring Bing Crosby), and romantic comedy (Love Affair [1939]). The lessons learned working with Chase and other members of the Roach lot provided McCarey with the foundation upon which all varieties of comedy could be constructed.

McCarey only seemed to falter when he abandoned laughs for the sake of social commentary, as he did with two anti-Communist dramas, My Son John (1952) and Satan Never Sleeps (1962). But this was not always the case. McCarey's 1937 drama Make Way for Tomorrow is a deeply unsettling look at the plight of the elderly in modern society, and proves that the director possessed a command over the medium that extended well beyond the boundaries of comedy.

Director: Leo McCarey
Producer: Hal Roach
Screenplay: H.M. Walker
Cinematography: Len Powers
Music by Ben Model (2005)
Cast: Charley Chase (Charley), Gladys Hulette (The Widow's Secretary), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Schwartzkopple), Oliver Hardy (Oswald Schwartzkopple), Frank Brownlee (Mr. Blaylock).
BW-21m.

by Bret Wood