Friday, Apr. 14, 1961

Remember the Belly Laugh?

Days of Thrills and Laughter (20th Century-Fox). Here comes Charlie Chase, natty in knickerbockers and a steamer cap. Oops! It starts to rain. No problem. Cheerful Charlie ducks under the nearest awning, buys a bumbershoot, strolls on his way. What's this? A flooded gutter? Charlie finds a plank near by, lays it over the water. Smirking triumphantly, he steps aboard, stares appalled as the board creaks, cracks, collapses, drops him into--glug! The flooded gutter turns out to be a flooded excavation.

Cheerless Charlie flounders to the opposite curb, climbs out, observes with dismay that his knickers are filled with water --they look like two giant links of knackwurst. Obviously, he has to let the knickers down. He gets as far as the second button of his fly. A policeman appears, eying him suspiciously--in his sopping suit the hero looks like a bum about to commit what the law calls a nuisance.

Tipping his cap politely, Charles waddles down the street at top speed. The cop follows hard on his heels. A doorway! Charlie ducks inside, shuts the door. Moments later, while the cop stares incredulous, a veritable torrent of liquid gushes underneath the door and plunges down the front steps. The door opens. Out steps the hero, smiling with relief and buttoning the fly of his empty knickers.

This classic example of the full-rolling, just-can't-stop-it, landslide laugh, coming at the end of Robert Youngson's third annual anthology of silent comedy, may prove a trying experience for modern moviegoers--many of whom have undoubtedly forgotten how to bellylaugh. On the other hand, most spectators will not resent the opportunity to practice, and Producer Youngson considerately precedes the Chase episode with 90 minutes of merely wonderful absurdity.

Among his snippets: Harry Langdon as a doleful doughboy sitting pitifully, with a tiny paring knife, beside a Popocatepetl of potatoes; Pearl White pursued down a mountainside by a paper boulder as big as a house; Ruth Roland lashed to an operating table while tuxedoed villains advance upon her prostrate form with a white-hot soldering iron; Charlie Chaplin disguised as a standing lamp; Doug Fairbanks missing a girl, kissing a table; Harry Houdini leaping boldly at one moment into the Hudson River and at the next, with grand disregard for geography, clinging desperately to a boulder at the brink of Niagara Falls.

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