Starring: Charley Chase, Anita Garvin, Shirley Palmer, Mitchell Lewis, and James Finlayson
Director: James Parrott
Rating: Six of Ten Stars
When an absent-minded office worker (Chase) and former lover (Palmer) end up living across the hall from each other, neither his wife (Garvin) nor the ex-lover's husband (Lewis) are happy about it.
"Forgotten Sweeties" is a comedy of errors where coincidences morph into misunderstandings that are piled onto mistakes until our hapless hero is about to lose his marriage if he's not murdered first. Like many Chase films, it's structured in such a way that the gags and situations feed naturally into each other, with their being a sort-of realism to the film that is not found in many silent comedies. Even better, the main character of the film is another one of Chase's Nice Guy heroes who is very literally just trying to get through the day and not looking for any trouble. You can actually feel sympathy for this guy, especially since there is almost nothing he could have done differently that would have not put him in the situations he ends up in.
This is one of those short films that will be ruined if I talk too much about what happens in it. However, I can assure you if you enjoy sit-coms and like silent comedies, you'll find plenty to entertain yourself here. Anita Garvin also gets to play a more sympathetic character than usual, so that's a nice change of pace.
Not every bit in "Forgotten Sweeties" works--and I suspect that part of that may be due to a social context that has been muted by the passage of time, but others are just a little too silly and drag on just a little too long--but the good outweighs that bad. The running gag with James Finlayson and a cat during the second half of the film is one of the highlights here.
"Forgotten Sweeties" is one of a handful of Charley Chase shorts included in the "Silent Comedy Classics" collection, all of which were digitized from the collection of film preservationist John Carpenter. It's a great DVD... at a price that's a steal. It's more than worth the price, I think.
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