Stevecorp Don't listen to the negative reviews

ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Zlatica One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

classicsoncall Hmm... I seem to be detecting a pattern here. With over two hundred film shorts to his credit, it's not surprising that director Roy Mack would go to the well more than once for the same idea. Trouble is, I seem to be catching them all in a row. In this case, I'm referring to a gimmick in the story turning out to be nothing more than a dream sequence of one of the principal characters. Catching a whole slew of these film shorts on TCM the past week, I've already seen "Soft Drinks and Sweet Music" and "Good Morning, Eve", both of which also disclosed events as a dream at the finale. Oh well, let's just go with the flow.So what we have here is a quintet of prisoners making a break for it from a chain gang while the inept prison guards don't seem particularly interested in catching them. Almost every other reviewer here mentions the posse using poodles and a collie to track the bad guys, but having been a Maltese owner for quite a few years, those 'poodles' looked suspiciously like Maltese dogs, or perhaps their close cousins, Bichon Frise. I can pretty safely say those dogs wouldn't have tracked anyone other than their owners! After their escape, the story zeroes in on one of the convicts named Jerry (Jerry Bergen) who makes it home to his wife. But after spending some not-so quality time with the Mrs., the 'dirty little fugitive' (wife's description, not mine) high tails it back to the swamp to hook back up with his chain gang buddies, who presumably have the same idea - let's break back into the hoosegow! You see, the warden is making some adjustments in order to pass muster with a governor's representative who'll be arriving soon to report on prison conditions.For what it is, this short is an amusing but non-sensical tale at least made lively by a bevy of dance hall beauties near the finale. But it wouldn't be long before the inmates would have to trade in their striped tuxes for real life back on the chain gang. That's about the time Jerry woke up!

Michael Morrison "Interesting" is rather a neutral adjective, connoting neither good nor bad. (In fact, remember that supposed Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times.")But "20,000 Cheers for the Chain Gang" is much more interesting than entertaining.It is one of the numerous Vitaphone shorts presented by Turner Classic Movies on the 90th anniversary of Vitaphone, then shown On Demand as part of a couple hours of some of the shorts.Jerry Bergen, whoever he was, is the nominal star, but he was more of a distraction, with a silly hairdo and almost as silly mannerisms. (He somewhat reminded me of Joe Besser.)However, as the ridiculous, but intendedly so, story continued, the movie became eminently watchable because of some beautiful legs among some talented dancers.Roy Mack directed hundreds of these Vitaphone shorts, and naturally some of them were better, and some, like this one, not so much.James Baskett is the uncredited singer, and is always worth hearing, and Harry Shannon, a good actor, is the uncredited warden.Sure, give it a look. It won't take more than a few minutes, and you might get a kick out of the very non-seriousness.

fredcdobbs5 I don't mind parodies at all--I loved "The Producers" and think "Springtime for Hitler" is terrific--but the people who did this travesty hadn't the slightest idea of what a parody was. This schizophrenic little short doesn't quite know what it's supposed to be--it bounces from slapstick comedy to musical numbers to (somewhat) serious comments on the brutal chain-gang system, and fails miserably at all of them. The lead "comic", someone named Jerry Bergen, was someone I had never seen before and, hopefully, won't see again. As bad as this short is, he makes it even worse, and with his incessant mugging, shouting and forced slapstick he manages to combine the worst excesses of Jerry Lewis and Jim Carrey into one annoying and talentless little twerp.If there's anything that could be even remotely considered to be a bright spot, it's a bevy of scantily dressed chorus girls doing a Radio City Rockette-type production number in the prison's chow hall--don't ask--and there's an amusing bit where the prison authorities track down the escaped prisoners not with large bloodhounds but with small poodles. Other than that, this atrocity has absolutely nothing whatsoever going for it.

evanston_dad This Warners short, which I presume ran on the same bill as Mervyn LeRoy's "I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang," is a mostly tired and unfunny film. It reminded me of just about every "Saturday Night Live" skit ever made, in which all of the actors think the material is funnier than the people watching it, and push a one-note joke to the brink of exhaustion.It is sort of fun to watch this after LeRoy's movie, because it spoofs specific details from the movie rather than its premise in general. Replacing the jailers' pack of bloodhounds with a bunch of fluffy white poodles was sort of funny, and I also liked the bellboy whose uniform was made of prison stripes.There are a lot of musical numbers incorporated into the action, performed by people I'd never heard of. The whole thing feels very patchwork and grade Z, with terrible sound and only the most cursory attention given to the actual film-making.