He Wouldn't Stay Down

"He Wouldn't Stay Down" was my first exposure to the forgotten silent comedian Ford Sterling, who was quite popular at the time. I have to confess I didn't really find much very funny about him -- he mainly runs about wearing a crazy haircut and beard, and pulls stunned faces.

There's a very good and rather shocking black comedy premise in this short: a young man plotting to murder another man to marry his wife and collect on her new insurance money. This early Keystone short gets some laughs out of it, but it just seems as if there is much more mileage to the premise that just isn't exploited. A lot of the comedy seems to be dissipated in scenes of people bobbing around rooms and miming the plot. A lot of the slapstick that there is feels confined, even though there are a number of locations available, and the situations just don't feel punctuated. Unintentionally amusing is Sterling drowning underwater while obviously looking out the window of a tank.

A youthful Charley Chase is here (directing as well as acting); we are used to seeing him in later films getting laughs by being a dapper, charming, likable gentleman who gets into the absurd and embarrassing situations conceivable. Here he gets the laughs by being a dapper, charming, likable gentleman who is also a murderer. This works, and his performance is probably the best part of the film.

It's not a totally unpleasant or dull little film, but it just doesn't get the comedy out of its premise that it could.

Charley Chase -- still working under his birth name of "Parrott' at this time; he wouldn't become 'Chase' for another nine years -- was not just a minor Keystone supporting comic at this point. He was a minor Keystone director, given the job of wielding the whip on Ford Sterling, one of Keystone's top three or four comics at this point, a man whose comic personna including a beard like a billy goat and a disposition as attractive.

So Chase, who in his time, would get fine performances out of Lloyd Hamilton, Billy West and eventually the Three Stooges, couldn't do much in this one-reeler about a cad who tries to drown Ford and steal his widow for the insurance money. But he gives it a decent effort and there's some good comedy construction about a trundle bed that turns out okay.

He Wouldn't Stay Down (1915)

*** (out of 4)

Funny black comedy has Charley Chase planning on murdering his best friend (Ford Sterling) so that he can then steal the insurance money from his wife. The title card calls this a "Farce Comedy" but that's probably because the term "black comedy" hadn't been invented yet. This comedy is pretty much as black as you can get as we not only get murder but also a suicide attempt to scare the wife. These dark subjects make for an extremely funny short from Keystone and it also let Chase shine as a director. He does a terrific job at keeping the film's pace at a high level and he perfectly milks the sequence where his character is trying to set the murder up. The drowning attempt and the follow up contain some very big laughs as does the ending where Sterling shows back up to seek revenge. I had been wanting to see Sterling in action for many years now and he certainly didn't disappoint as his comic timing was as great as everything I had heard and he really added a lot of entertainment to the movie. Chase is also at top-form playing that lovable bad guy that he would play countless times throughout the 1920s.

Ford Sterling is featured in this typical Keystone offering. He insures his life and a false friend tries to drown him. The insurance money is collected, but Ford turns up and saves his wife and money from the friend. There are numerous rough spots in this, but it is very funny. - The Moving Picture World, June 5, 1915