HAVE BADGE, WILL CHASE!

 

As far as I know, I have never seen Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops (1955; Charles Lamont) in its entirety. This is the story of why, despite that seemingly insurmountable fact, it's a movie that has had a huge impact on my life.

When I was but a babe, my mom and dad, like many young marrieds who suddenly found themselves with children back in the early '60s, bough an 8mm Bell & Howell camera-projector combo package with which they set about documenting the adventures of those children-- me and my little sister, Carrie-- as we toddled our way around my grandma's farm, where we all lived until around 1966.

At age three or four I remember a hug level of excitement whenever they would trot out the home movies, but not just because of the chance to see myself and my sister on the big(ish) screen my dad would have to set up as a prelude to our evening's entertainment. No, see, as a part of that Bell & Howell set there were included two 50-foot, approximately four-minute-long 8mm reels from Castle Films included, presumably to get the buyer excited about what their new projector could do before they shot any film of their own. 

One of those was The American In Orbit, which featured lots (well, not lots) of footage of John Glenn, at the time a freshly minted national hero, in his space capsule orbiting the planet, interspersed with lots of animated "simulated footage" to fill out the four-minute running time of this little pseudo-newsreel.

The other was 240 seconds of the wackiest cuts from that Abbott and Costello picture, a typically extreme cutdown issued by Castle Films (and oh, how I would cherish collecting those beauties about 10-11 year later) which excised the rest of the presumably boring shit, quite literally cutting to the chase to create a reel that three-year-old me thought was just peachy.

Every time dear old Mom and Dad brought out the projector I would beg to see that reel, which was retitled by Castle Have Badge, Will Chase. But Dad, not being much of a movie fan and not one who would see much value in his investment in motion pictures beyond recording his kids and his hunting trips, only agreed to about one out of every five desperate pleas to screen the hilarious black-and-white comedy, which I thought was so much more entertaining than watching me cavort in diapers on a playground slide or sitting thorough endlessly dull footage of him and his buddies sitting around a campfire, surrounded by a bunch of shotguns and dead ducks.

And of course his resistance to showing to me whenever I asked only served to create even more of a mystique about the reel. This wasn't like TV, you see-- I couldn't just flip a switch, wait for five minutes for our little black-and-white portable set to warm up, and then get what I wanted. I actually had to put some serious blood, sweat and tears into creating the opportunity where I might get to see it. Which made those times when I actually did get to sit beside the projector and watch this little movie flicker past even more special.

Of course, I loved Have Badge, Will Chase. (I wouldn't know its real title or from whence that little plastic hub of comedy gold originated until I was much older.) And I probably saw it multiple times before my mom and my aunts took me into town to see my very first movie in a theater, Gay Purr-ee (1963), at the glamorous and now gone-baby-gone Marius Theater in none-too-glamorous downtown Lakeview, Oregon.

Which means that this short, severely edited shard of celluloid extracted from Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops was probably the very first movie, in any form, that I, at three years old, ever became obsessed with, thus paving the way for a lifetime of similar and far more intense, personal movie obsessions to come. Thanks, Dad!

One of these days I'm gonna have to see the whole thing!