His Wooden Wedding (1925) watch online HD

The beauty of Charley Chase's great great comedies of the mid-twenties -- MIGHTY LIKE A MOOSE, CRAZY LIKE A FOX and this, HIS WOODEN WEDDING is that they are first, very funny and second, complete stories. A perfect little farce goes on in twenty minutes, instead of two or three hours. The stories make sense, if you assume the premises, the people do funny, funny things and the stories actually work.

Charley is about to get married, and his best man wants two things: Charley's bride and the heirloom diamond that Charley has given her as an engagement present. So he writes Charley an anonymous note that his bride has a wooden leg. Sounds stupid? Yes, well, it works, and several hilarious sequences ensue. It's twenty minutes of low comedy that will leave you gasping.

Charley Chase by the mid 1920's was a major star. Like any other major star, he could afford to take chances in his films. Unlike Chaplin in his early days, who will always overshadow him, Charley Chase took chances in his films. As a result, many of Chase's films contain some very wild comedy and sight gags. His Wooden Wedding is no exception. Charley is warned from marrying a girl by a guy with ulterior motives. In the end, we know Charley will come to his senses, but before he does, we're treated to some very funny moments. Charley's vision of the future, the many hat gags throughout the film, and especially the dance sequence aboard ship were absolutely hilarious and left me in stitches. One of the reasons Chase is not as well regarded as other comedians of the silent era is he was very generous with his supporting cast members in sharing the spotlight for attention. Katherine Grant, a local beauty queen, is shown to good advantage in a bathing suit circa 1925 with her great legs, kicking Charley's nemesis in the head. **1/2 of 4 stars.

While slapstick luminaries Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd spent most of the 1920s in feature films, the short comedy format in which these men had started was still very popular and a consistent money maker for that premier silent comedy factory, the Hal Roach studios. Charley Chase is not a big name today, but back in the 1920s, among those who were doing shorts and not doing features, he was a front runner.

His Wooden Wedding is one of the neater, more concise Charley Chase shorts, which tended to be stuffed with gags but a little haphazard in structure. Even this one however manages to be fairly disparate in its settings, moving from a wedding ceremony to an ocean liner. Director Leo McCarey keeps things suitably silly, with lots of exaggerated bits of physical comedy that are almost cartoonish. When a suitcase is dropped onto a car, the front wheels come off. McCarey keeps that dilapidated car in the foreground like an accident waiting to happen. The gags aren't always of the highest quality he knows how to present them for best effect.

And just like the car, Charley Chase's main function in these comedies is to overreact. He is a little like that prolific supporting player Edward Everett Horton, in that his horrified expressions add a whole extra layer to the comedy. That slight turn of the head, the rigid body, the mouth in an "O" of shock, is Chase's trademark. He can crank it up depending on the level of surprise, here adding some owlish blinking when he is informed of his fiancé's wooden leg. A key sequence is the flash-forward, Charley's bizarre daydream that having a wooden leg is hereditary, and all his children will be similarly afflicted. It is on the one hand a typical bit of Roach studios absurdity, but it's also very much in keeping with Chase's comedy persona, whose responses become wildly irrational.

Charley Chase never starred in a full-length movie, which is probably the main reason he is not so well known today. Fortunately, just as we are starting to reassess the value of Chaplin's and Keaton's early work, so too are the short comedies of lesser known comedians being rediscovered. Chase is by no means as accomplished as those great comics, but at a time when Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton were getting ever more ambitious, Chase was still managing to do some pretty funny things in a twenty-minute slot.

"His Wooden Wedding" is a 20-minute short film from 1934, so this one is already over 90 years old. The director is Leo McCarey and he is known for his work during the era of silent black-and-white films and looking at the film's age, this is of course one of these as well. It is still somewhat known today and has not vanished into obscurity like many others because the lead actor is Charley Chase who was a really big star back then. The rest of the cast members I must say I am not familiar with. I had a huge problem watching this as the entire film is based on the idea that a man intends to marry a woman, but finds out she has (allegedly) a wooden leg. I myself wonder why does he believe it? I know people were waiting with sex until marriage back then frequently, but has not even seen her legs? And even if she had such a leg, then why would he leave her because of that if he really loves her. I find that absurd and it made it difficult for me to appreciate everything that comes afterward, even if it gets better and occasionally more realistic. I give this one a thumbs-down. Not recommended.