Jeffries Jr.

I'm a big fan of Charley Chase, but I think that while this film, from his early "Jimmy Jump" series is enjoyable, it is nowhere near his best. The previous film "Young Oldfield," had featured famous racer Berney Oldfield as a guest star to get the proceedings going along. Here the guest star is famous boxer James J. Jeffries, and he's more at the center of events. This isn't necessarily a good thing, since the necessity of using Jeffries seems to have hurt the development of the comic storyline.

Chase is a young weakling (perhaps prefiguring the "nance" twist he would later develop for his character) who seeks to get Jeffries to train him, and that is the extent of the plot. Chase injects some very good comedy here, including a running gag involving a pair of glasses that same him from every fight he almost gets into and an amusing sequence with a mirror, but mainly the basis is that Charley can't train to be quite the boxer that the former champion is. Fun as this is for the only ten minutes the short runs, there does seem to be a missed opportunity for some of the situation-based humor the Chase was expert at, and which he'd already proved did work well enough in the one-reel format.