by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last
Charles and I both got back so late — he from work and I from an Activist San
Diego radio meeting — that instead of a feature-length film we ran a few shorts
we’d just downloaded from archive.org. One was Whispering Whoopee, a 1930 Hal Roach comedy directed by James W. Horne
and starring Charley Chase (his real name was Charley Parrott, and when he
directed himself — which he did fairly often — he took his directorial credit
as Parrott and his acting credit as Chase; his brother, James Parrott, was also
a Roach director) as a property owner who’s trying to unload a parcel in
Rockaway, New Jersey on the city government. Figuring that the best way to get
the deal done is by exploiting the weaknesses of the flesh in the men he’s
dealing with, he hires three professional vamps (even in the so-called
“pre-Code” era the script by H. M. “Beanie” Walker and almost certainly the
usual crew of Roach gag men couldn’t come right out and say they were
prostitutes, but it’s pretty apparent) to seduce them into buying his property
at a good price. The vamps, interestingly, are played by three Roach
contractees who use their real names for their characters: Thelma Todd, Anita
Garvin (quite striking and leggy even though she was better as the vengeful
virago in the Laurel and Hardy short Blotto than the good-time girl she’s playing here) and
Dolores Brinkman.
Only when Chase opens the door to admit the representatives
from Rockaway, he finds that the city government is ahead of him: instead of
the presumably reprobate men he was expecting he finds three straight-laced,
sour-faced old men (Dell Henderson, Carl Stockdale and Tenen Holtz) — also,
interestingly, using their real names for their characters — and he also has to
deal with his landlord, Mr. Richmond (Edward Dillon), who warns him he’s
already had too many neighbors complaining about his penchant for wild parties
and this is his last warning: if he throws another one, he’ll be tossed out of
the building. So he tries to keep his good-time girls quiet and demure — to the
point of grabbing a throw-rug and draping it over Ms. Brinkman to make her
costume just a wee bit more modest — only Ricketts (Eddie Dunn), his butler,
who isn’t in on the change in plans and misunderstands Chase’s hand signals,
spikes the drinks to be stronger, not weaker, than usual — and the alcohol does the trick and the men
start responding to the advances of the women and the overall devil-may-care
atmosphere of the party that develops. Eventually the principals start an
all-out war with seltzer bottles that escalates into a typical Roach
tit-for-tat slapstick scene until the men suddenly remember that what they came
for was to sign the agreement to buy Chase’s property — which they do, with a
fountain pen, only just then a few more blasts of seltzer hit the document and
wash away the signatures. The End.
Whispering Whoopee is a routine two-reeler with one absolutely
inspired and anarchic moment the Marx Brothers would have been proud of — Chase
leads the three Rockawayans in a wild sing-along to the “Rockaway Booster Song”
(I’m not making this up, you know!) — but aside from that it’s amusing but not
scream-out-loud funny, and frankly Chase was better as a harried husband in the
films he made that anticipated the formulae of 1950’s TV sitcoms (though John
Bunny, a heavy-set middle-aged man who made a series of silent comedy shorts
for Vitagraph between 1912 and 1915, when he died, was not only the first movie
comedy star but also the true founder of the sitcom series — especially since,
like such legendary later sitcom couples as George and Gracie, and Lucy and
Desi, he and his wife actually played husband and wife on screen) than he is as the rambunctious,
unscrupulous go-getter he plays here.
