Hello Baby! (1925) User Reviews

Katherine Grant Shows Off

[boblipton · 7/10 · 9 May 2021]

Married couple Charley Chase and Katherine Grant.hear a knock at the door. They open it to find a baby, who they promptly adopt.

Miss Grant gets more to do than usual in this 'Jimmy Jump' one-reeler, doing tumbles and handsprings. There is also a nice sequence with Chase trying to deal with various issues of it being night outside. Although the Chase shorts would improve greatly when he went to two reels and include an actual story to guide the gags, this is a very amusing shorter effort.

A miracle!

[hte-trasme · 9/10 · 24 December 2009]

By the time of "Hello Baby!" Charley Chase has arrived at a point where he has found almost a formula for making varied and wonderful comedies fit into the short tel-minute format of the one-reelers he was working in. A surprising big event precipitates a series of progressively frustrating and excruciating situations for Charley. In this short this works extremely well, complimented by some of Charley's top-rung gags.

We start with a very clever and filmically stylish gag in which an atmospheric shot of Charley as safecracker becomes Charley as sneaking home late and turning on the radio. The baby is deposited on the door of the young couple -- who are humorously shown later to have no idea what to do with a baby (do babies eat lobster?) -- and there's a great moment where Charley's declaration that he will protect the little girl is undermined by an anatomical examination of the baby. The frustrations of people trying to get a baby to sleep and trying to get to the doctor in the middle of the night are great to mine for material, and the ten minutes are jammed with humor that moves fast and still doesn't feel rushed.

We also get to see Charley actually run over by the car in the course of a very funny mechanical gag sequence, and frequent cutaways of Katherine Grant, very funny as Charley's wife -- trying to entertain the crying child with a one-woman acrobatics show. There's a sweet final moment where Charley finally has some success and invents the baby bottle by himself.

These one-reelers could easily become trivial, but by filming "Hello Baby!" with great, varied, and well timed material, and producing it in a visually-impressive way that shows a great deal of care has been taken, Chase as the team at Roach Studios prevent this. This is the early one-reel-era Chase in fine form, recommended both for his fans and the unconverted.

They could have done a lot more with this basic plot...

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 10 October 2011]

This Charley Chase short starts off very well with a clever gag involving a robbery and a safe. I won't say more--it would ruin the laugh. Soon after, there's a knock at the door--someone's left a baby. Charley and his wife decide to keep it--after all, it's a cute kid and they'd like a baby anyway. However, both turn out to be incredibly inept parents as they seem to know almost NOTHING about babies--even the basic stuff. As a result, the kid keeps them up all night until an annoyed neighbor tells them what to do.

The idea of a comedy involving a baby on the doorstep has promise. However, the writer didn't seem to know what to do with the idea. As a result, despite some promise, the film just seems to end with no real payoff or laughs. Not bad...just not all that good.

Clever robbery intro baby on doorstep

Becoming Charley Chase

[Michael_Elliott · 17 March 2010]

Hello Baby! (1925)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Charley Chase arrives home late from partying and quickly tries to sneak pass the wife (Katherine Grant) but she's already up and waiting. The two don't have time to get into a fight as they hear something out on the porch, which turns out to be a baby. The couple bring it in to raise as their own but they don't know what to do once he starts crying. The premise of this thing is actually better than the actual film but we do get some pretty funny gags scattered through. The best gag happens when Chase gets caught on a sewer top in the middle of a dark road when he sees headlights approaching. This gag has two different versions here and I won't ruin them but both are very funny. The stuff dealing with the never really gets any laughs as all the obvious jokes are gone for and the "reason" for them rushing out to get a doctor isn't that funny either and I'm sure most will see it coming. There's a final gag of them taking a glove and turning it into a nipple that is rather charming because it appears to have been shot on the fly and Chase's reaction to what the baby does is rather priceless as it seems real and not scripted.