Three by Charley Chase: "Are Brunettes Safe?," "Forgotten Sweeties," and "Bigger and Better Blondes" (Hal Ruach Studios, Pathé, 1927)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 3) the “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies consisted of three short films by comedian Charley Chase. His real name was Charley Parrott and the movies – Are Brunettes Safe?, Forgotten Sweeties, and Bigger and Better Blondes – were all made in 1927 by Hal Roach Studios for distribution by Pathé just before Roach switched his distribution contract to MGM. They were also all directed by Chase’s brother, James Parrott (later on Charley would start directing his own films and would take his directorial credit as “Charley Parrott” and his acting credit as “Charley Chase,” much the way later singer-songwriters like McKinley Morganfield, Chester Alan Arthur Burnett, and Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus did: you know them better as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Elvis Costello, respectively) and written by H. M. “Beanie” Walker, one of the few title writers in the silent era who successfully converted to writing screenplays for talkies. Chase is often considered the father of situation comedy, though an even earlier star, John Bunny, probably deserves the honor: like such later sitcom stars as Lucille Ball and Gracie Allen, he worked with his real-life spouse and was employed by Vitagraph, and since Mr. and Mrs. Bunny were both rather heavy-set the two couldn’t have done the kind of knockabout slapstick specialized by Mack Sennett’s Keystone crew. So they did a more sedate, genteel sort of movie humor that Vitagraph sold audiences as a kinder, gentler alternative. The three Chase films were shown in descending order of visual quality; the first, Are Brunettes Safe?, contained a closing credit thanking archives in Germany and Austria for supplying prints and for the most part the Boris Faquality was excellent, probably quite close to what 1927 audiences saw. Alas, the other two were considerably blurrier.

Are Brunettes Safe? Is an engaging little farce about “Helping Hand” (Charley Chase), an advice columnist at a big-city newspaper who receives a letter from a small-town woman asking for his help in finding her long-lost son. She enclosed a photo of him, and damned if he doesn’t look just like Charley Chase. On the advice of his editor, who thinks there’s a great human-interest story in it, Chase goes to the small town and impersonates the brother, not realizing that the brother is in fact Bud Gordon, notorious bank robber and criminal. There’s a tearful reunion between mother and (supposed) son in which she tells him all the crimes he’s accused of in the hopes that he can prove his innocence. He meets Bud Gordon’s sister (Lorraine Eason) and falls for her, only there’s the little problem that he’s supposed to be her brother even though he really isn’t. Ultimately it all turns out well as the real brother comes back to town and is duly arrested, while Chase and Bud’s sister get together after all once it’s established that Chase isn’t her brother. Forgotten Sweeties is a more off-the-wall comedy about two young couples, Thurston and Lillian (Charley Chase and the marvelous Anita Garvin, who played comic bitches brilliantly for Roach but never got the feature-film break she deserved) and Ira and his wife (Mitchell Lewis and Shirley Palmer), who literally can’t get away from each other. Lillian sees her husband getting cruised by the other woman and demands that they move somewhere else – only every place they try to move, first to a rental house and then to an apartment building, the other couple follows and rents either the same house (courtesy of an intrepid realtor who seems to think the place is vacant even though it isn’t) or another unit in the same apartment building.

Bigger and Better Blondes – a truly misnomered movie since there are no blondes of any size in the film – casts Chase as an employee of a jewelry store that has just been robbed. The jeweler who owned the store had luckily kept the VanDeusen jewels at his home, preparing to clean them, and he assigns Chase to return them. But Chase runs into Ramona VanDeusen (the young Jean Arthur, who’d become a blonde later in her career but was still dark-haired here) at a restaurant and cruises her. In order to impress her he puts on one of her rings, but she recognizes it as hers and thinks Chase is one of the jewel thieves. Chase loses the ring in a pot of soup and grabs the pot, serving himself the whole supply of soup in an effort to find the ring, but he has to reckon with another customer (Sammy Brooks) who just happened to get the serving containing the ring. There’s some nice slapstick as Chase tries to get the ring away from Brooks before he swallows it, thinking it’s just part of the soup. The diner is also inhabited by the real thieves, Boris Fantomas (Mario Carillo) – the name comes from a then-popular French serial about a master thief who’s a good/bad guy like Raffles and The Saint – and his sidekick (Edgar Dearing). Ultimately it ends the way it’s supposed to, with the crooks being arrested, the VanDeusens getting their jewels back, and Charley getting Ramona. Charley Chase was not exactly one of the greats of silent comedy (and judging from the films of his I’ve seen I’d say he got better when sound came in), but these films were charming and welcome diversions.