Mum's the Word (1926)

User Rating:

6.0/10   

Director:

Leo McCarey

Release Date:

9 May 1926 (USA)

Genre:

Short | Comedy

Plot:

A widow has married rich, but didn't tell her husband about her son. And he's coming for a surprise visit...

Plot Keywords:

Valet | Maid | Daughter | Remarriage | Secret

Cast

Charley Chase	...	Charlie, the Son
Virginia Pearson	...	The Wife
Martha Sleeper	...	The Nervous Little Girl
Anders Randolf	...	The Husband

Runtime:

USA:24 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Silent

Company:

Hal Roach Studios

Trivia:

A Parody of The Spoilers (1923); this was originally a two-reeler which was cut down to a one-reeler. Not a lot of this film exist now.

Not one of Charley Chase's better efforts

Buster Keaton once told an interviewer that he didn't care for farce comedy because farcical plots are based on lies. That is, one character tells a lie, someone else tells another, and the whole thing snowballs. As Keaton astutely pointed out, if these people would just tell each other the truth you wouldn't have a show at all. Even so, and despite such flimsy underpinnings, farce can be enjoyable if a clever playwright or screenwriter manages to come up with a reasonably well-motivated storyline, good gag sequences and some witty dialog, especially if the piece is played full-tilt by gifted performers who believe wholeheartedly in what they're doing. But if the plot isn't properly motivated, the gags are weak and the performances are halfhearted, you've got a dud on your hands. Unfortunately for fans of farce, MUM'S THE WORD is one of the misfires.

The whole plot of this film hinges on a middle-aged woman marrying a second time who refuses to tell her new husband that she has a grown son; meanwhile, the husband is hiding a similar fact from his own past. Okay, that's a decent enough premise, but we need something more, we need to know WHY they are so determined to keep such significant secrets from each other. All it would take is a line or two of explanation to satisfy the viewer, but we're given nothing to go on, so everything that follows feels unmotivated.

Worse still, nothing especially funny happens. Charley Chase was a gifted comic but like anyone else he needed decent material, and in MUM'S THE WORD he isn't given much to work with. There's a moderately funny scene in which Charley, pretending to be the husband's valet, attempts to give him a shave, but the scene's possibilities aren't fully realized. Later Charley attempts a variation on the famous Max Linder/Charlie Chaplin 'mirror routine' in which, seen only in silhouette, he pretends to be the husband's shadow. But again, the sequence fizzles out without much of a pay-off. The whole movie feels uninspired. It looks like the script was only sketched in, and the filmmakers were hoping that inspiration would strike while the cameras were rolling . . . but apparently it didn't.

Charley Chase is likable even when he's struggling with weak material (for me that makes him the opposite of Jerry Lewis, whom I dislike even when his material is good), but it's disheartening to see him in such a dud as MUM'S THE WORD. Even determined Chase fans may find this one disappointing.