Chase is surely one of the most amiable of silent comedians (and one of the few that you could never refer to as a silent clown- he's just too suave and dashing for that)- here he is a self-made young millionaire who has to pretend, for predictably convoluted reasons, to be a chauffeur, in order to win the approval of a young charmer's father. It flits by like an innocent breeze, and Charley reeks of charisma even now. You do feel he could play well to modern audiences, certainly every bit as much as, say, Harold Lloyd, whose character seems more firmly rooted in the ambitions and hang-ups of the period.
The opening half drags rather, despite benefiting hugely from a turn as a good-natured cop by the irresistible Eugene Pallette. The silent movie policeman is a maligned and rarely well-represented character, but Pallette's cop is great, and he plays a lovely part in getting the two lovebirds together. The key scene early on though is a rather overblown drapery store scene, full of squabbling women and scenes of ass-kickin' 20s ultraviolence (well, to a degree...)- this may well have worked okay in cinemas with the laughter of a room full of people to sustain it, but it really drags now and doesn't even work towards any great pay-off. Fortunately the stuff to come, especially Charley's dance with the mannequin, and the rosy-faced Oliver Hardy flirting with the mannequin, more than compensate.
The score on the DVD I've seen was really lovely, but spoilt but a bunch of hugely annoying sound effects- who could possibly have thought these were a good idea?
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