'Bad Boy' will give you a good time

Bad Boy (1925)
Starring: Charley Chase, Martha Sleeper, Hardee Kirkland, Charles Force, Noah Young, and Eddie Borden
Director: Leo McCarey
Rating: Nine of Ten Stars

Jimmie (Chase), the college educated son of a self-made man (Kirkland), tries to fit in among the working class in order to learn the family business and keep the affections of the woman he loves (Sleeper). His efforts become complicated when he is mistaken for an infamous gangster.

"Bad Boy" is, like most Charley Chase films, a carefully constructed bit of comedy where the main character is carefully established and the situations he finds himself in almost always end up happening due to either a flaw he possesses or a goal he desperately wants to achieve. Further, each gag and joke feeds and builds into one another with a precision and purpose that would make an engineer proud.

In this particular film, it's our hero's desire to please everyone that gets him into trouble or embarrassing situations. First, he tries to fit in with the iron workers at his father's mill, then he tries to please his mother by taking part in a dance performance at a garden party that ends up embarrassing him in front of his girlfriend; and then, while trying to behave like a manly man to win her back, he ends up earning the ire of all the patrons at a nightclub and triggers the brawl that serves as the film's climax.

The film is further ordered by its three very distinct locations--the steel mill, the garden party, and the dance club. In this, the film even manages to fall neatly into the traditional three-act structure, despite being just around 18 minutes in length. It may even go a little further than that, actually. In some ways, the action in each location unfolds almost like a story unto itself, with each featuring a beginning, a middle, and an end. Although each segment could stand perfectly fine on its own, they all feed into each other and combine to not only establish Charley Chase's character as a likable and decent guy who just doesn't fit in easily anywhere. Further, over the course of the film, the supporting characters of the parents, and even the girlfriend, develop in ways that make them more compelling than such figures usually are in these short comedies... and because of the clean breaks between the locations, it's a pleasant surprise to see character development continue across them.

The version of "Bad Boy" that I watched (and which is embedded for easy viewing below) also benefitted from an actual musical score, written by Maurice Saylor and performed by his Snark Ensemble. It's a perfect example of how big a difference it makes when the music is synchronized to what's happening on screen instead of just some random piano music or jazz tune being slapped onto the film.