He thought about the boy in the aisle, the figure that had watched and then drifted away. He thought about the line in the booklet: “When you gather them back, the audience is whole again.” And for reasons he could not name, memory felt like a puzzle and laughter like a key.
In the late 1930s, Chase moved to Columbia Pictures. These are darker, faster, and more frantic. The often includes rough cuts of The Pandora’s Box (1936) — a film that was thought lost until a collector found a print in a South African barn in 2004.
Born Charles Parrott in 1893, Charley Chase began his career in vaudeville before transitioning to film in 1912. He worked with legendary studios like Mack Sennett’s Keystone, where he directed and performed alongside Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle. However, it was his move to Hal Roach Studios in the 1920s that catapulted him to stardom and allowed him to define his signature style.
If you call yourself a student of comedy, you have a blind spot. Charley Chase is it. Do not wait for Netflix to license his work. Do not wait for a 4K Criterion release. Find the Charley Chase MegaPack . Pour a glass of sarsaparilla, silence your phone, and prepare to meet the funniest man you have never heard of.
Rediscover one of silent and early sound cinema's greatest talents. It’s time to cut to the Chase.
This is a masterpiece of mistaken identity and is often cited as one of the finest two-reel comedies ever made. The plot involves a homely couple who, unbeknownst to each other, go off and get plastic surgery, only to meet again and try to have an affair. It's a brilliantly risqué and hilarious film that was selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.
