From Bad to Worse

Charley Chase's second movie for Columbia is a remake of the 1926 Billy Bevan short HUBBY'S QUIET LITTLE GAME. Director Dell Lord and writer Al Giebler had worked on the earlier movie and its producer, Mack Sennett had a habit of raising cash by selling off scripts from his old movies since his studio had collapsed.

While this is a typically highly competent movie, Chase and Lord had not yet begun to develop the details that would show up in the best of their Columbia shorts. Timid Charley is on his honeymoon with Peggy Stratford, hoping to make a business connection with Bud Jamison (in the role played by Vernon Dent in the earlier movie in a standout performance) and keeps running into Jamison's wife under embarrassing circumstances. The gags are mostly typical Columbia head clunks with loud sound effects and dangling from suspenders, rendered amusing by the experts, but nothing that other comedy pros could not have performed.

It wouldn't be long until Charley and Dell would begin to develop their own brand of comedy, pitched midway between the Columbia house style typified by the Three Stooges and Charley's Roach comedies in which the gags arose uniquely out of comedy. However, it isn't in here.