Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Marie Dressler, Charles Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain and Charles Bennett

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

It's strangely appropriate that the last Chaplin picture at Keystone to be released to theatres turned out to be the only feature he shot there, Tillie's Punctured Romance. While it's far from his most memorable work for the studio and it was far from the last thing he shot there, it was a notable milestone in cinema and it works well as a broad dividing line between the two halves of his Keystone career, the first half in which he learned his trade acting for other directors and the second in which he finessed his skills while directing himself. Shooting began on Tuesday, 14th April, three days after Sennett had shot Chaplin in a one day film, A Busy Day. Before that, Chaplin had made fourteen films for six different directors, sitting in the director's chair himself for only one and a bit. By the time shooting wrapped on Tuesday, 9th June, he had made five more, all directed by Sennett. However, the remaining fifteen he would go on to make were all under his own direction; this was the final acting job he did for another director at Keystone.

The milestone isn't merely that this was Chaplin's debut feature, not to be followed until The Kid in 1921, or that it was the first feature shot at Keystone Studios; it's generally regarded as the first feature length comedy ever made (though some cite Battle of Gettysgoat instead). Features weren't new, but they had never been comedies before. The first dramatic feature, the Australian film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, predates this by eight years. France followed in 1909 with Les Misérables; and Italy and Russia produced their debut features in 1911. The US caught up in 1912 and it produced at least four features that year, the same year in which Sennett left Biograph to found Keystone, one of fifteen production companies in what would become known a year later as Hollywood. 1913 was the real year of expansion, as theatres replaced nickelodeons and the middle class accepted motion pictures as respectable entertainment. In only half a decade, the US went from producing four features a year to over six hundred.

It's no surprise that early efforts were rough around the edges and the first American feature to be widely acclaimed as a masterpiece wouldn't arrive until 1915, that being D W Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It's no great challenge to find flaws in Tillie's Punctured Romance, even if it was adapted from an established stage play, Tillie's Nightmare, written by A Baldwin Sloane and Edgar Smith and first staged in 1910. The lead actress who Sennett hired, Marie Dressler, was clearly the best choice, given that she had originated the role on Broadway and toured with it for three years. This was her first movie, though she was already 45 years old and had been successful on Broadway since 1892, so to support Dressler, Sennett cast most of the recognisable faces in his company, led by Chaplin and Mabel Normand. Only a few, such as Roscoe Arbuckle, are notable for their absence. So, Sennett had a successful play, its successful leading lady and a successful supporting cast. What could go wrong?

Well, the most obvious problem is that nobody had done this before. Sennett knew that what might work on stage wouldn't necessarily work on screen, but he had no conception of what would keep his audience laughing for the then unimaginable length of 85 minutes. While he kept the script moving, the pacing is utterly broken, mostly because the concept of time is non-existent. We literally have no idea how much time has passed at any point, a need that seems obvious in hindsight given that there are two separate stories unfolding for half the movie and we're constantly waiting for them to collide. This problem is why the pace is off and there's neither suspense nor surprise. My better half, watching this for the first time with no foreknowledge of events, found it easy to explain what would happen later in the current act and to what that would subsequently lead in the next. It really is a predictable affair, painted in broad strokes and constantly telegraphed. Anything positive to say on those fronts is wrapped up in the word 'first'.

So let's take a look at what this first comedy feature had to offer. It's all about Tillie, as you might expect from the title, even though Chaplin's star rose long before Dressler's on the silver screen and so reissues tended to shift his name above the title and hers below it. She's a country girl who works the family farm and she's outside with her hoe when Chaplin arrives, throwing a brick for her dog to fetch and hitting him instead. We see him from behind first but his outline is instantly recognisable, even though he's not the Little Tramp this time out. He does have tears in his jacket and a familiar bamboo cane to twirl, but he's a lot more dapper than usual, with a pork pie hat, a tie and a sash. His jacket fits for a change and there's a suave moustache rather than his usual toothbrush. His hair makes a statement too, as if to highlight that this is the Little Tramp playing the Latin Lover. Naturally, Tillie is quickly smitten and she gets all girlish after she literally carries him inside to recover from the brick.

Thus far, we've learned that Dressler is more than able to work the slapstick routines Sennett wanted. We also realise that he's inordinately fond of having characters kick each other in the ass, a frequent move in Chaplin's early Keystone films but one which gradually vanished after he gained some creative control. It appears so often in this one that it's almost like the picture's heartbeat. Chaplin's character, an unnamed City Stranger, learns from a casual kitchen transaction that Tillie's father is rolling in dough. He knows its location too, because he hides it poorly. So he escalates the flirtation, eventually upbraiding Tillie's father for kicking her ass yet again and becoming firm and devilish with her, almost stalking her as he suggests an elopement, paid for with her father's money, of course. Tillie has enough sense to hold on to the cash, but little enough that she goes along with the stranger's plans. Yes, this good country soul is robbing her dad to elope with a stranger she met an hour earlier. Credulity is certainly stretched.

That's the end of the first of the six acts which are layered on top of each other to comprise this feature. I wonder if the title cards that announce each of them were a means for the audience to keep track of how long they had to wait until it was over. Act two begins with the couple in town, Tillie floundering around in traffic, and the third wheel about to make her appearance. This is Mabel, looking a lot more dreamy in an Oriental outfit with a huge ruff than Tillie does in her outrageously awful dress and still more horrendous hat, complete with duck standing up between its flowers. Mabel is Charlie's girl, or at least she was; she's a little taken aback to see her man back with someone else. This escalates in a bar, where Dressler hams up her first drink with abandon. Charlie ends up with the cash, so does a runner with Mabel and Tillie is a drunken pauper, ejected with prejudice for being unable to pay. A few minutes later she's in the Keystone Kop station, biting the booking officer's finger, while Charlie and Mabel purchase clothes in a posh store.

You can be sure that we're going to get a lot more to the 'punctured romance' of the title than that and it all happens through Charlie getting back with Tillie whenever it's fortuitous for him to do so then doing a vanishing act whenever it stops being fortuitous. The discovery that her uncle is a millionaire sparks only a first return to her, but Charlie bounces back and forth between Tillie's money and Mabel's looks so often that we do wonder why either of them would put up with him. Eventually, of course, they don't, and how the three of them end up is far from surprising. What's surprising is that it's Mabel who gets to grow with the story; Charlie is exactly the same person at the end that he is at the beginning and Tillie doesn't find any real change either, even though most of the things that happen in this movie happen to her. Mabel's character grows both through realising what Charlie is and through a clever parallel in a movie, A Thief's Fate, that Charlie takes her to see, inadvertently sitting next to a cop in the process.

So, while the feature itself is generally clumsy, predictable and unimaginative, there are moments where the combination of actors and situation generate some magic. Charlie's amorality, Mabel's growing guilt and the increasingly suspicious glances from the future Charley Chase as the cop sitting next to her are one of my favourites. The brief flirtation between Tillie and Charlie is another, with Dressler acting giddy and coquettish, no mean feat for someone of her size; she throws flowers at him, while he throws a brick at her. Tillie's drunk scenes all raise a laugh, even though Dressler overplays them throughout; she's fun in jail and she's even more fun dancing a jig over crossed swords at her uncle's mansion. Mabel is given drunk scenes too, which also work well, but they're later in the film during the rapid fire finalé, where the technical side of the film finally decides to earn some praise through some capable editing. It's hardly an impressive picture otherwise from any technical standpoints, though it could have been a lot worse.

Most of the problems are understandable for the first comedy feature ever made. Everyone involved with this picture, whether in front of or behind the camera, was used to making short films, one reelers or two reelers but never a six reeler, and it's very obvious that they treated it like six short films that they could lump together into one feature. They had no idea how to scale, so the aspects that annoy the most over a six reel length could have been easily shrugged off in a single reel. For instance, there's a stretch of road that appears more often than many of the name actors, as it's right outside every location. It's in front of the bar Tillie gets drunk in, Tillie's uncle's mansion, Heywood's clothes store, the theatre playing A Thief's Fate, you name it, always shot from the same position. It's not the location, it's the repetition. A different sort of repetition is annoying too, because this picture checks off all the usual Keystone locations: a park, a bar, a pier. Often this feels like Keystone's Greatest Hits, especially after Chaplin's 35 other 1914 films.

Critics haven't been kind to Tillie's Punctured Romance, which tends to be remembered for nothing more than being a milestone. They might grant a little leeway here and there for a century old picture, but not much. Of course, Marie Dressler would go on to much greater success on screen but not until she'd left it in 1918 and returned again in 1927. While she showed that she was capable of performing slapstick on a debut outing just as well as the veterans who supported her, it was sound comedy that led her to win an Oscar in 1930-31 and become the biggest star in Hollywood in both 1932 and 1933. She died in 1934 at her peak. In my opinion she's unfairly slighted for this picture. Certainly she overacts throughout, unlike the far more realistic style she'd use in the early thirties, but this style fit the material and she did it well, enough to return to the role for two sequels, Tillie's Tomato Surprise in 1915 and 1917's Tillie Wakes Up. A more grounded portrayal might have dated better but would have felt out of place at the time.

Mabel Normand has been remembered more positively than Dressler, but her sympathetic performance is grounded in a character written with sympathy. Tillie's too much of a fool, a bouncing village idiot, for us to really feel for her when she ends up in the mess we knew she would always end up in. Mabel may be a fool too, but she comes to realise it and, once she's at that point, she does something about it, thus garnering some real sympathy, especially at the end. We feel for her when we don't feel for Tillie and we cheer for her when we don't cheer for Tillie. Bizarrely, what Normand does here to gain our sympathy is precisely what she doesn't do to gain our sympathy in Mabel's Busy Day, shot right in the middle of the shooting schedule for this feature. Here she grows her character and gets us onto her side through well phrased subtleties; in the short film, she merely plays the 'woe is me' card throughout and we can't feel for her in the slightest. This is a much better opportunity to see her really act.

But, of course, we're not here because this is a Marie Dressler picture or a Mabel Normand picture. We're here because it's a Charlie Chaplin picture, his first feature, made as he was starting to be really noticed and released as his star was rising. He didn't think much of this film. 'It was pleasant working with Marie,' he remembered in his autobiography, 'but I did not think the picture had much merit.' He was right, but it didn't matter. While his character has little depth, certainly none of the complexity that the Little Tramp would find in later years, he does play him more as a crook than a villain. It would have been simple for him to reprise the stereotypical silent movie villain that he played in his first film at Keystone, Making a Living, but he'd moved far beyond such banalities already. By the time this was released, he'd moved on again, his work in a recent short like Getting Acquainted far more clever. Chaplin was still singled out for praise, the big success of the film, ending his Keystone career on a high note with the future wide open.

Important Sources:
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Tillie's Punctured Romance can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

His Prehistoric Past (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mack Swain, Gene Marsh and Fritz Schade

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

His Prehistoric Past sits uncomfortably at the end of Chaplin's year at Keystone Studios, his final short to reach theatre screens. It wasn't the last one that he shot, as it was in the mail to New York two full weeks before Getting Acquainted was begun, but that picture was released two days before this. Neither was it the final chance for audiences to see Chaplin's name in a Keystone title, as Tillie's Punctured Romance, the feature in which he'd shot supporting scenes midway through the year, was still going through post-production and wouldn't hit theatre screens until 21st December. However it's more of an ending to me, because it feels rather like an afterthought. At first glance, it's merely weak, albeit in an oddly interesting way, as a period piece set as far back as the stone age, with the Little Tramp in a loincloth but comically retaining his hat and cane. The catch is that it's less funny than anything else that had carried his name for months, and it runs on for two reels with less material on show than he'd often used to fill one.

It's difficult to look at it as anything other than a contractual obligation, that he knew he was leaving the studio and couldn't be bothered to put as much effort into this last picture as he was into the negotations with competing studios about where he would move to next and for how much money. While he claims in his autobiography that 'it was a wrench leaving Keystone', it wasn't a slow one. 'I finished cutting my film on Saturday night,' he explains, presumably talking about Getting Acquainted, 'and left with Mr Anderson the following Monday for San Francisco.' That's Bronco Billy of the Essanay Company, at which he would spend the next year and a half at the salary of $1,250 a week, on top of a $10,000 signing bonus. Mack Sennett had baulked at $1,000 a week, saying that it was more than he earned as the head of the studio, but midway through 1916, Chaplin moved again, this time to the Mutual Film Corporation, for $150,000 and a salary of $10,000 a week. His Prehistoric Past was surely quickly forgotten.

However, on analysis, there's a little more going on in it than initially meets the eye. For a start, it's not a new concept that Chaplin had conjured up out of thin air; the whole piece is a parody of a two year old D W Griffith picture called Man's Genesis, which appears to be a rather serious fable told by a grandfather to his little ones, but it carries an unwieldy subtitle, A Psychological Comedy Founded on Darwin's Theory of the Genesis of Man, just in case. In this film, Lilywhite, a young cavegirl with a straw outfit that makes her look like Rapunzel, is eagerly sought after by both Weakhands and Bruteforce. She wants the former but gets the latter instead, because the characters are appropriately named. However, while Bruteforce has brawn, Weakhands has a brain. Back in his cave, he apparently puts a doughnut on a stick and thus creates a club, with which he wins the day. It's effectively the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, phrased as a fable to explain that brain beats brawn, even if it happens to be with a club.

As a serious piece of art, Man's Genesis is rather comedic, which may explain the subtitle, but it certainly explains why Chaplin felt it ripe for parody. Instead of an old man sitting down to stop his grandchildren squabbling, we get the Little Tramp curling up on a park bench and promptly dreaming of the stone age, in the form of 'the kink of 'Wakiki Beach' surrounded by his favorites'. The 'kink' is Mack Swain, wearing a lot less than usual but retaining his full Ambrose moustache, and the reason for the typo in 'king' is that he has a sexy sextet of cavegirls seated around him. Other sources identify him as King Low-Brow, which might explain why he's watching Cleo the bearded medicine man attempt some sort of prehistoric ballet instead of putting those 'favorites' to good use. The blonde is Cecile Arnold, but her sisters in skins don't seem familiar, even if the BFI lists one as Vivian Edwards. His favourite 'favorite' is Gene Marsh, who is either his favourite water maiden or his favourite wife, but Weakchin soon hones in on her anyway.

No guesses as to who Weakchin is, but he gets a memorable enough entry for Chaplin to remember it in his autobiography. They do say the clothes make the man and he's a fetching sight in his bearskin, with the usual bowler and bamboo cane retained for laughs, however anachronistic they clearly are. He has a pipe too, which he fills with hairs that he plucks from the bearskin and lights with a rock he strikes on his leg instead of a match. Leapfrogging the majority of the plot of Man's Genesis, he also arrives complete with a spiked club in hand. Gene Marsh isn't as ethereal a girl as her namesake Mae Marsh was in Man's Genesis, but the outfit is too close to be accidental. She cosies up with Weakchin, but the battle is soon commenced when Cleo spies them together and shoots the newcomer in the back end with an arrow. For a while, it's painful, with Weakchin, Cleo and Low-Brow improvising gags around a huge boulder like they invented the first pantomime, but it does get better.

Many of the laughs come from attempts to apply modern day concepts to the stone age like they're in a town called Bedrock and they're a modern stone age family. This is Meet the Keystones, right? I did get a mild chuckle out of swapping cards or mixing cocktails, but the king's cave is quite obviously a bundle of tarps and never rings remotely true. Of course, Weakchin soon finds himself alone on the beach with the bevy of beauties because this is a Chaplin movie, and when another suitor attempts to steal them away, he has his club ready to steal them back. Showing a little restraint, he hones back in on Gene Marsh, who is clearly uncomfortable, not so much to be stolen away by Chaplin but because her outfit apparently has a habit of falling off. As they frolic in the ocean, she spends a conspicuous amount of time trying to keep it on and, at one point, apparently fails. There definitely seems to be a wardrobe malfunction going on as they try to clamber back out of the water, suggesting that body parts are on display that shouldn't be.

What leaps out here most is that His Prehistoric Past is a lot slower than it has any reason to be. It makes little sense to see something like His Musical Career notably crammed into a single reel, while this picture benefits from a second for no reason at all. There are moments of note, not only Weakchin's entrance but Gene Marsh's come hither looks on the road and Mack Swain literally getting kicked off a cliff, but they're few and far between. Instead we have to settle for Fritz Schade's ballet dancing, Al St John being used as a footstool and that cringeworthy chase round the boulder. Mostly we're stuck with a lack of imagination, a lack of energy and a lack of sophistication. Chaplin had been learning so much at Keystone, especially during the second half of 1914 when he had more creative control, and watching these pictures on their centennials has ably highlighted just how much, not just in acting, but use of character, emotion, pacing, composition, editing, choreography, you name it. Almost none of that is on show here.

And, of course, the obvious reason is that he really didn't care any more. He was about to take his talent and his newfound knowledge of the cinematic arts to Essanay Studios, not only for the increased salary but to serve as the next step in his growth. It's so easy to dismiss this as a half-assed last effort to finish up and get gone, but there's one massive reason why I can't buy it. That's because, when we get to the very end where Weakchin has occupied the kink's cave with his favourite girl, when King Low-Brow shows back up and drops a large rock on his head, when we leap back into the present day to see that become a Keystone Kop's truncheon waking up the Little Tramp from his slumber, we can't ignore the final scene. That's not just any Keystone Kop smiling at Charlie, that's Chaplin's half-brother Syd, four years his elder, who had finally joined him in the movie business. It was Syd who had introduced Charlie to Fred Karno in 1908 and now Charlie had returned the favour and introduced him to Mack Sennett.

Oddly, Syd's contract was earning him $200 a week, $25 more than his now very well established brother was getting, but Chaplin had a good idea what he was worth and his salary was about to leap forward. He held no grudges and even offered Syd a partnership in their own company, but the latter felt that it was a risky proposition, especially as he was earning more money than he'd ever earned in his life. So Syd held back at Keystone for another year, where he made a number of films including A Submarine Pirate which, after Tillie's Punctured Romance, was the highest earning picture that Keystone ever made. After leaving Keystone, Syd would become Charlie's manager, securing him record contract after record contract. They would work together for years. Given how close they were, I can't help but see this final scene as acutely deliberate: Charlie's last moment in a Keystone short but Syd's first in a Chaplin picture, a passing of the torch scene. It's a good moment, but it really deserved to be in a much better picture.

Important Sources:
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

His Prehistoric Past can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Getting Acquainted (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

There's a particular irony in the title of this picture, as Chaplin's 34th of 1914 alone features many of the same faces as many of the 33 that predate it. Working through them on their centennials, mimicking the experience of an admittedly dedicated audience member of the era, has made this set of films feel like a television sketch show, where we fully expect the core cast to play a different role each week (even each skit), regardless of gender, race or age. Thus audiences had been getting acquainted with the players of Getting Acquainted long before it was made and they'd surely got very used to their respective traits by this point. There's nothing surprising about these characters played by Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen, as they had played similar ones in similar picture over the previous weeks. What's new here is really only the introduction of a Turk, apparently out of the blue, and the removal of the usual slapstick props and moves Keystone was known for, as Chaplin finessed his material.

The template for this one seems to be Gentlemen of Nerve, three pictures earlier in Chaplin's career and itself highly derivative of still earlier films. That one saw Chaplin and Swain at a racetrack, where Charlie picked up Mabel because her beau, played by Chester Conklin, was trying it on with Phyllis Allen instead. Mack Swain was in that picture too, but mostly just to get stuck in a wall, rather than to get embroiled in the tangled web of changing relationships. Here, he gets to join in, because Ambrose and Mabel are an item in this picture, while Charlie is with Allen's character, who is unnamed, as always. This time out the action unfolds in a park, but to emphasise the influence, Joe Bordeaux promptly drives up in a glorious automobile ('car' just doesn't cut it) which putters out in front of Ambrose and Mabel. Ambrose lends a hand in cranking it back into motion, thus leaving Mabel open to Charlie's unwanted attentions which, in turn, leave Ambrose able to try it on with Phyllis Allen and the dance of the flirts is in play.

In fact, the working title of the film was The Flirts and it makes a lot more sense than Getting Acquainted for the majority of the running time, at least until the combination of complex connections within such a small cast of characters means that the pairings change. We usually see what we saw in Gentlemen of Nerve, when Mabel showed up with Chester Conklin but left with Charlie, but here the connections aren't defined by relationship, rather by commonality. As Charlie and Ambrose begin to weave their respective ways in and out of scenes with increasing rapidity, Mabel ends up on the same bench around the same tree as Phyllis Allen and, as ladies who have new stories must, they naturally share them, so building a connection. Meanwhile, their respective husbands end up in the same place too but, rather than a neat bench, it's the shelter a bush offers them from the inevitable Keystone Kop that appeals. Both men are hauled off by their wives in the end, but the ladies have connected and so have the men.

What this leaves us with is something that feels rather more British than anything Chaplin had done yet. The structure reminds of the sophisticated English drawing room farces which would become the rage on stage, but translated into the setting of an early American film comedy. It's light years away from a Noël Coward comedy, as none of the characters are remotely sophisticated, but the format fits and the tone is a lot closer than usual because they don't indulge in any of the usual Keystone slapstick. While there is a Keystone Kop on hand, played this time out by Edgar Kennedy, and he is kept incessantly flustered, there are no pies or bricks hurled, no asses kicked and none of the wrong people slapped. Even more notably, this Keystone park comedy does not, I repeat not, end with at least one key member of the cast dumped unceremoniously into the lake. That's a little jarring, as we've been reinforced to expect it, over and over again, making this feel somewhat like a familiar joke whose punchline has suddenly been changed.

The point of course is that the comedy in Getting Acquainted isn't based on physicality, it's based on the characters and their interactions, here including 'a passing Turk', an exotic stage stereotype who comes complete with fez and dagger. The very first scene is a perfect example as, to the standard Keystone way of thinking, absolutely nothing happens but, to Chaplin, it sets the stage perfectly. Charlie and Phyllis are a couple, but clearly not a happy one, as Chaplin's face suggests. She trumpets and complains and blows her nose, while he merely reacts to her. What's more, he looks directly at us through the fourth wall as he does so, in an attempt to involve us in the conversation. In just over thirty seconds, his eyes switch back and forth between his wife and we, the viewers, over twenty times, as if to ask, 'You see what my world is like?' Without a single intertitle, the two of them provide us with their entire relationship. By comparison, Mabel and Ambrose look happier together, but he clearly doesn't listen to her in the slightest.

Of course, from these first two scenes, we fully expect that Phyllis is going to go to sleep and Ambrose is going to drift away, leaving Charlie and Mabel free to connect yet again, but Chaplin didn't want to keep things so obvious. Sure, Phyllis goes to sleep and Ambrose works on the automobile, but Cecile Arnold is the first distraction for Charlie. She's blatant enough that after Charlie shimmies away from his sleeping wife, she bends over right in front of him but, following her, he finds himself blocked by a fearsome Turk. Why we have a Turk in this movie, I have no idea, but he appears out of the bushes as a defender of the lady's virtue, with his arms crossed, his stare wicked and his dagger quickly forthcoming. Charlie is quick to take the back foot but the Turk promptly stabs him, almost in slow motion, in the nether regions and the chase is apparently on. From here on out, it's merely a question of how intricate that chase will get, as it gradually involves Charlie, Ambrose, the Turk, the Keystone Kop and a variety of ladies.

If this sounds like Chaplin was moving forward yet again, you'd be right. Keystone comedies didn't tend to have a structure beyond the general format of slapstick shenanigans leading to a chase, but this is a complex creature with intricacies put together more cleverly than anything Chaplin had done thus far. If anything, the minimalist setting aids this magnificently. Dough and Dynamite had a lot going on too, but it was staged in an environment that built a story, with bakers pitted against their boss, waiters against customers and all them caught up in a whole set of escalations to reach the literally explosive finalé. In this film, there are people and a park and that's it. None of the luxuries of the earlier picture exist here. There are names in the intertitles, but we aren't given professions. There are no sets and no props, just the park itself and anything the characters brought with them, like Charlie's cane and the Turk's dagger. Everything has to be conjured out of thin air and, as Chaplin ably demonstrates, that's all he needs.

Emotionally, we don't really feel for the beleaguered women, for various reasons. Phyllis is the battle axe she usually is, so it's always fun to watch her bubble burst. Mabel is sympathetic, of course, but we can't fail to appreciate the extravagant set up Charlie employs to get her lips close to his, involving removing a stray hair from her shoulder and balancing it on his nose until she's near enough to grab. She's also both able and willing to slap him when he goes too far, which he does more frequently than usual, even using his cane to pull up her skirts. If anything, we feel more for the Keystone Kop, who Kennedy unfortunately overplays with silent era gusto, literally leaping into action, because he just can't keep track of who he's to chase. With two ladies suffering from the unwanted attentions of men (hardly gentlemen), he has two to pursue and the fiery Turk makes three. It's a hard life being a Keystone Kop, that's for sure! The ladies do find confusion of their own too, as the dance progresses.

And this really is a dance, as much as anything else. While silent era movies were clearly not written for dialogue, they often did revolve around intertitles, the equivalents of the day, to varying degrees. That's true for many Chaplin films too, where an intertitle would set a scene of improvisation in motion, but it's not true here. This film was clearly written entirely around the choreography, which is pretty astounding given that, according to Jeffrey Vance, Getting Acquainted was shot in a single day. The BFI details four days, a long weekend from Friday to Monday, with the negative shipped to New York the next Sunday. It has to be said that the Keystone crew had spent so much time in Westlake Park during 1914 that it must have been viable to choreograph the whole picture from memory. It's understandable that we might see the park as Keystone property, but it wasn't, and the glimpses of what we might believe to be extras or the dogs of extras are probably just other patrons of the park straying into shot.

If the obvious standout here is the choreography, following rapidly behind is the editing. Just as the way this comedy of errors proceeds like a dance, so does its editing, which is as fast paced as anything that I've seen from 1914, especially during the second, frenetic, act. The introductory scenes are just as long as usual, as are the final scenes to wrap things up, but in between them the cuts come thick and fast, to keep all the characters in play and to telegraph where they're going next. As these cameras don't move, it might seem like a foreshadowing of what Russ Meyer would later become famous for, but there's little to suggest specific motion here, merely that there's a lot of it happening. Certainly, it's far ahead of the editing at the beginning of Chaplin's 1914, where it was notable only in how unnotable it was. Chaplin's mastery of the medium clearly wasn't just restricted to being in front of the camera. This highlights yet another aspect that he was starting to understand and nail down for future work.

Important Sources:
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Getting Acquainted can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

His Trysting Places (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

If His Musical Career often felt like a two reel comedy crammed into a single reel, often with the funniest bits skipped over too quickly or left out entirely, His Trysting Places feels more like a coherent story which unfolds at a more appropriate pace. It's clearly not up to the levels of Dough and Dynamite, but it is very much a success and it ably shows how Chaplin was enjoying the opportunities that he found in character and story from simply doubling the length of his pictures. If anything, this could have easily be expanded to a third reel, as he set up four characters but wasn't consistent in how well he explored them. Also, the introduction of a baby to the mix, for the first time in the context of Charlie being a father, adds a whole new dynamic that he found he couldn't quite explore. The baby is less of a character and more of a prop, ironically emphasising how he wasn't ready for this sort of thing; The Kid was seven long years away. It's obvious that the baby should either have been excised entirely or built up to a more substantial role.

Little Peter is introduced right at the beginning, a chunky little kid who cries quite a bit. Then again, that's hardly surprising given that he's found himself in a Keystone picture with Charlie and Mabel as his screen parents. The astounding scene that sets the film in motion unfolds in their cramped kitchen as they cook dinner. Charlie, distracted by a newspaper, is tasked with supervising the open range with a powerful fire blazing under the saucepan. Mabel, right next to him, is preparing food on the table with the baby in her arms. Gags almost write themselves and Charlie runs through a whole bunch of them. He sits in the fire, leans his elbow and hand on it, puts his feet up on it, you name it. In 1914, it was good riffing on a prop but, a hundred years later, all we can fearfully wonder is how close that baby is going to get to that fire, especially given what Mack Sennett said in his ghostwritten autobiography, King of Comedy, that Chaplin 'preceded W C Fields by many years with scenes in which he got laughs by being mean to a baby.'

Jeffrey Vance ably highlights the major difference between Charlie as a father here and in later films with reference to his 'frequently cruel screen characterization'. Certainly he's far from a model father, hauling his baby around by the scruff, then giving him a real gun to play with while he relaxes with the paper in the kid's crib. I wonder how much of it is really cruelty though and how much a combination of laziness, distraction and incompentence, not to mention the yawning abyss of a hundred years between then and now. Today, this couldn't be shot without CGI for safety reasons, but back in 1914 I doubt anyone thought twice about it. Two of my grandchildren are under a year old today but, back then, my own grandfather was only five years old. It's sometimes difficult to imagine how much has changed in a mere century, but this fabulous medium of film helps us to see it in scenes like these. It wouldn't surprise me if kids today were as surprised by the presence of a newspaper here as by the open range. Perspective is everything.

Charlie and Mabel are one of two couples in play. They're hardly living in poverty, especially if we look at future Chaplin pictures for comparison; they have a decent home with a well dressed child and numerous comforts to hand. Charlie's trousers seem to fit better than usual, even if his coat is still notably too tight. However, they're not living in the lap of luxury, which is far more apparent in the other couple they run into here, Ambrose and his unnamed wife, played respectively by Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen. They live in what seems to be a swanky hotel and it's as Ambrose leaves for a walk that the situation comedy that drives His Trysting Places starts to fall into place. Clarice is a young lady working in the lobby, presumably some sort of secretary, who knows Ambrose and asks him to post a note for her. Naturally, it's a smoking gun letter, a 'meet me in the park this afternoon at our little trysting place' love note, addressed only to 'my darling'. It's a great foundation stone from which to build a slapstick comedy and it's put to good use.

First, of course, we have to get it into the wrong hands, which happens at a restaurant. Charlie heads out to buy something for the baby (and thus perhaps impress his wife who's clearly fed up with him) and he ends up at the same restaurant as Ambrose, the pair ending up seated next to each other over bowls of soup. Charlie hasn't endeared himself to the establishment as, after hanging up his coat, he steals from a customer's plate and then dries his hands on the man's long beard, but it'll soon get worse. Ambrose, it seems, is unable to slurp quietly, so the meal, itself cleverly choreographed, promptly turns violent and becomes a fast paced fight with all the expected Keystone moves delivered rapidly, right down to the pie that Charlie hurls at a departing Ambrose, only to instead catch a well dressed passer by right in the face. Of course, in the kerfuffle, Ambrose escapes with Charlie's coat and Charlie ends up with Ambrose's and we're in business just as the first reel gives way to the second.

Perhaps the best aspect of the film is its pacing, which devotes its first half to setup and its second to the increasingly fraught misinterpretations which drive the comedy. The scripts reproduced by Simon Louvish in Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett, put paid to the long standing belief that Keystone films were almost entirely improvisations leading up to chase finalés, but they were still generally episodic in nature and without any real structure. Chaplin's scripts were already clearly moving beyond Sennett's, most obviously with his two reelers, and this is a great example. It introduces characters and sets up the gags to come, pivots halfway to allow those gags to play out, then escalates all the way to the finalé, with one extra gag held in check until the very end. It's not Dough and Dynamite, but it's yet another example of how Chaplin was gradually mastering his art. While there are flaws to be found in the structure, there is little to argue about with the pacing.

Those flaws mostly tie to the disparity between the characters. Thus far, it's been predominantly Charlie and Ambrose, with a little attention given to Mabel and some distraction with the baby. Ambrose's wife is almost unseen in the first half, only on screen to bid him farewell as he wandered off for his stroll. All that changes in the second half, with the ladies given just as much time as their husbands, even if one never does get a name. Mabel, a subservient character in the first half, begins this shift as Charlie arrives home and she wonders what he brought for the baby. Of course, she finds Clarice's note and immediately takes charge, letting him have it to the degree of breaking her ironing board over his head, until he flees home and makes for the park. Meanwhile, already in the park, Ambrose is getting plenty of attention too, from his wife, who cuddles him on her ample bosom. I've never been a big fan of Mack Swain's goggling eyes but they're highly appropriate here, as is his widow's peak which becomes more of a proto-devilock.

It's no chore to guess how everyone's going to meet up. Charlie actually sits on Ambrose's wife, before he starts to unload his troubles on her instead. 'My wife's gone foolish,' he begins, while setting the stage for Mabel's imminent arrival; she's hot on his heels, having paused only to leave their baby with a Keystone Kop. Mabel Normand has a fair shot of stealing this part of the film, but Chaplin holds his own with the aid of a dustbin put to glorious use as a prop. To give him credit as a screenwriter, while he gives himself and his side of the story great moments, he doesn't forget that Ambrose and his wife are the other half of that story and he gives them great moments too. Phyllis Allen never underacted, even by 1914 standards, but she does faint well when she discovers the baby bottle in her husband's coat and assumes that he has a child that he's hidden from her. That husband gets a few moments of his own too, in both halves of the action, before they all catch the error and start to put things to rights.

There's a lot to like here, in a two reeler that is somehow full and yet unhurried at the same time. Chaplin does a lot with His Trysting Places but he lets it unfold naturally, his gags playing out well and the regular Keystone actors easily up to the task. The lesser side of the film comes with how the baby is so ruthlessly used as a prop rather than a character, something Chaplin would soon switch around, and how that time was stolen from Ambrose's wife, who deserved as much build up as the other leads. It's easy to imagine her unable to have children, hence her babying of her husband and her fainting dead away after finding the baby bottle in Ambrose's coat, but that's never called out because she doesn't even have a name, let alone a background. Glen Cavender has less to do here than perhaps any Keystone Kop ever did, mostly there as a suggestion that's never put to real use. It could easily be argued that Nick Cogley had more to do as the bearded customer at the restaurant, who vanished to vacate a seat for Charlie.

The BFI resource pages on Chaplin carry various dates for his films, including when they were shot, when the negatives were sent from Los Angeles and received in New York and when they were first released to theatre audiences. If they're to be trusted, this was the first of Chaplin's films to be shown out of order. It wasn't uncommon for some to overlap, especially one day shoots that enabled Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal to reach audiences before Mabel's Strange Predicament, for example, but this was the first time that a film completely shot before another would be exhibited after it. His Trysting Places was shot before His Musical Career, concurrent with the post-production of Gentlemen of Nerve. That film was in production between 20th and 27th September, although the race at which it was shot took place on day one, while this is listed from the 19th to 26th. I have no idea why this picture was effectively sat on in New York for over a month but it was certainly worth the wait, better than Chaplin's previous two films combined.

Important Sources:
Simon Louvish - Keystone: The Life and Clowns of Mack Sennett (2003)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

His Trysting Places can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

His Musical Career (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

His Musical Career isn't a bad picture but it's far more notable for what it inspired than for what it is. Most obviously it's one clear inspiration for the Laurel and Hardy comedy, The Music Box, which won the debut Academy Award for Live Action Short Film (Comedy) in 1932, eighteen years after this film was released. Technically, The Music Box was a vague remake of their 1927 short film, Hats Off, which is sadly now lost; in that film, Stan and Ollie hauled a washing machine up a long flight of steps in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, but they reverted in the later short to the piano that Chaplin introduces as a prop here. They did retain the same stairs though, which are unsurprisingly a tourist attraction today and which had been already used by Billy Bevan in Ice Cold Cocos in 1926, as well as Charley Chase for Isn't Life Terrible? one year earlier. His Musical Career isn't another one, but the stairs which Chaplin and Mack Swain climb here with their piano appear longer, narrower and steeper.

Many connections exist between His Musical Career and The Music Box, even if we bypass Hats Off as an intermediary step. Chaplin and Laurel knew each other well, of course, having both worked for Fred Karno in England and travelled to the States with him in 1910, when the latter was still Stan Jefferson, Chaplin's understudy. The Music Box was also made at Hal Roach Studios, directed by James Parrott, the brother of one of the studio's biggest stars, Charley Chase. The latter, under his birth name of Charles Parrott, which he continued to use as a director, started out as an actor at Keystone Studios in 1914, as did Chaplin, and the two appeared in many of the same films. In fact, his first three confirmed roles were in Chaplin shorts, Mabel at the Wheel, The Knockout and Mabel's Busy Day, which were Chaplin's 11th, 18th and 19th films respectively, giving the latter a little head start. What's more, Parrott was in this picture too, briefly as the manager of the music store which hires Swain and Chaplin to take care of deliveries.

The most obvious connection though is the gag that involves one large man and one small man hauling a piano up a long and narrow flight of stairs. However, The Music Box treats this as the core of its story and tasks its leads with handling just one piano over three reels of film; here, Swain and Chaplin handle a pair of them in only one reel, with this being just one gag to play with. In fact, while it's played well, it may not even be the best gag in the film, that honour going to the one that follows it as Charlie staggers around the apartment of Mr Poor with the whole weight of it on his back while the three other people in the room dilly dally about deciding where he should put it down. So, while Laurel and Hardy's Oscar winning short isn't a remake of this film, it's still clearly inspired by it. It's also a much better picture, not just because it had three reels and a lot more money and time to play with. Chaplin had one more single reeler left after this one at Keystone but, after Dough and Dynamite, his mind was clearly on longer material.

We open in relatively lackluster fashion, with Chaplin getting a job working for Mack Swain, both of them presumably in their regular personae as Charlie and Ambrose, even though they're sometimes credited as Tom and Mike. The main gag here is a routine prank which Charlie plays on Ambrose by switching two identical tins of liquid so that he takes a swig of the piano varnish instead of the water. It's hardly high art and it's followed only by Charlie taking a nap on the keyboard and falling off. What's most important here is how Chaplin strips off his shirt to emphasise the size difference between him and his co-star. He was a mere 5' 5" tall, while Swain was 6' 2" and much larger in every direction. With this setup, the contrast is even more obvious than it was between 5' 8" Laurel and 6' 1" Hardy. Chaplin even flexes his muscles, but only serves to show how scrawny he was compared to Swain. Naturally, it's Charlie stuck underneath the piano on its way up those stairs and once it makes it to the top.

There's another contrast in play, a simple but effective one. Mr Rich buys a piano from the store and Mr Poor is unable to keep up the payments on the one he already has, their names being as representative of their financial status as you might expect. That's fair enough for 1914, especially as they both live on Prospect St, but it doesn't raise the laugh that accompanied the inspired names in The Rounders, a mere two months earlier, of Chaplin as Mr Full and Roscoe Arbuckle as Mr Fuller. Mr Rich's place is number 999 and Mr Poor is at 666; the two unsurprisingly get mixed up, albeit by the store manager not Ambrose and Charlie as is usually claimed, given that we clearly see the house number at Mr Rich's. Character names aside, these early scenes are notable less for Chaplin, Swain or Chase and more for Frank Hayes, another actor hired by Keystone in 1914. His flamboyant overacting, in which he doesn't really act so as much as he dances with the air, ably highlights why his career trajectory didn't match Chaplin's and Parrott's.

And so to business. The first hints at the real Chaplin arrive when they move the piano outside, where we discover a real storefront belonging to the Wiley B Allen Co on South Broadway in Los Angeles, only a few blocks away from the Marsh Strong building out of which Chaplin had hung precariously four films earlier in The New Janitor. In fact, as John Bengtson, 'the great detective of silent film locations' notes, we're able to see that very building here as Swain and Chaplin load the piano onto their mule-drawn cart outside the store. There's a great moment here as Ambrose pulls the piano off the shop floor and Charlie slides along behind it, another one follows immediately as Ambrose stops and Charlie discovers that he can't move it himself whatever amount of effort he puts into the task. Unfortunately this scene is let down with a return to the infamous one in The Property Man when Charlie's aged assistant gets stuck under a heavy trunk. In this film, it's Swain under a piano, but there are less shenanigans and even less to be offended by.

In the restored print made available by Flicker Alley in the Chaplin at Keystone box set, it's easy to see an abundance of members of the public reflected in the shop window. Presumably they're merely passers by eager to see the filming in progress and we can see how they were moved back for the next shot in which the dynamic duo load the piano onto a rickety looking cart. We can also see the shadows of whoever tilts the cart after it crawls to a stop, given that the drivers have fallen asleep and the mule can't be bothered any more. Up goes the mule into the air a couple of times before they move on. It's a memorable shot, if not one that could perhaps be accomplished today with animal safety laws that were notably absent back in the silent era. And so, we finally reach 666 Prospect St with over half the picture already behind us, for the supposedly dangerous looking scene where Ambrose and Charlie haul the piano up those steep and narrow stairs. It would seem more dangerous if only the piano wasn't clearly a light and hollow shell.

It's still pretty effective though, with Swain leading the way and Chaplin following on behind, ambitiously attempting at one point to hold the piano above him through the use of only his bamboo cane. Of course it doesn't work and down comes the piano, but they do make it on the second try, which, as we discover later with Laurel and Hardy, lets the instrument off far too easily. Rather than build the gag, Chaplin sees it as done and he promptly moves on to the next one, which memorably sees Charlie floundering around with a piano on his shoulders, fervently wishing that someone would decide where he should put it down. I liked the delays here and Chaplin makes the most of them, staggering around, wiping his brow, almost doing the splits. It's impressive physical humour, however light the piano shaped prop really was. I liked how he couldn't stand up straight afterwards too, requiring Swain to tip him over onto his head and push him back into shape with his big boot. So much for the flight of stairs.

The whole segment at 666 Prospect St took less than four minutes to unfold, pretty impressive given that it took Laurel and Hardy three reels to do the equivalent, but that leaves even less time for the dynamic duo down the road at 999. At least here we don't have to put up with Frank Hayes gurning up a storm as if he was being paid by the facial expression; instead we get the lovely Cecile Arnold wondering why they seem to be taking a piano away instead of delivering one. There's a little fun with the rich and expensive knicknacks and furnishings in a set as lavishly decorated as Mr Poor's wasn't and they do get to violently push over an employee and even disrespect Mr Rich himself, but mostly this seems like an afterthought because the film was a one reeler and time was running out. The very last scene, in which the piano and its handlers descend a hill and end up in a lake, could have been a reel all on its own but has to settle for a few seconds instead because that's all there is left.

I wonder why Chaplin felt he should cram all this material into one single reel of film. He was experienced in one reelers by this point, having acted in a bunch, then written and directed a bunch more, but he had at least a few two reelers behind him as well, so he knew how much could comfortably fit in each format. It's always possible that it was supposed to be a two reeler but became one, but I doubt it; it's much more likely that Chaplin was still learning what worked and what didn't. Perhaps this was an experiment to see how much he could viably fit into a reel and the end result was that he found out that this was too much, with many scenes truncated far beyond viability. By the end of the film, it's not difficult to blink and miss a gag, if not an entire scene. Could that be deliberate escalation on Chaplin's part, especially as the pace does speed up consistently throughout? Again I doubt it, even if he was avoiding the traditional Keystone chase finalés. Whatever it is, this is too much and not enough all at once, capable but hardly essential.

Important Sources:
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

His Musical Career can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Gentlemen of Nerve (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Chester Conklin and Mack Swain

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

The grand sweep of Chaplin's Keystone pictures, especially those from the second half of 1914 which he wrote and directed himself with the benefit of substantial creative control, is clearly all about his growth as a filmmaker. Most of these self-directed films highlight his newfound mastery of something and a new experiment to attempt to solve something else. Given that his previous film, Dough and Dynamite, was a peach of a picture, surely his best yet, it's somewhat frustrating to realise that this one absolutely isn't. I have no doubt that the title of Gentlemen of Nerve is supposed to have at least three meanings, but I'm seeing the fourth, which is the nerve of the gentlemen at Keystone, including Chaplin himself, who shot this overly generic revisit to a number of his earlier films and released it three days after what became his most successful Keystone picture of them all and arguably his best too. A quarter of the way in, my better half asked me, 'Didn't we see this one already?' and I knew exactly what she meant.

The first deliberate meaning of the title presumably refers to the real drivers racing their automobiles on the Ascot Park Speedway in Los Angeles on Sunday, 20th September, 1914. This is the same venue which served as the background for Mabel's Busy Day, four months earlier, possibly the worst of Chaplin's 1914 shorts. That was ostensibly a Mabel Normand picture with Chaplin trying to steal it from her, while this is a Charlie Chaplin picture with Normand trying to steal it from him, so it could easily be regarded as a riff on the earlier film or a thematic sequel. I found Mabel's Busy Day not only the worst of Chaplin's pictures for Keystone but the one in which he was most obnoxious and least sympathetic; he returns to that here somewhat but not to the same degree. Fortunately, Mabel, an annoying character in that film too for her constant 'woe is me' attitude and an unbelievable copout at the end, is an absolute joy here and surely the cause of some of the best moments in the picture.

The second meaning isn't obvious on screen, but refers to Bert Dingley and Ed Swanson, for whom this event was a benefit as they'd been recently injured racing in Tacoma. Dingley was a major name, known at the time as the first American Championship Car Racing champion, having won the championship in 1909. Racing was a dangerous sport and injury or even death were common. In 1929, after fifteen years of advancement from the vehicles seen here, the Indianapolis 500 was filmed for Speedway, a William Haines film. One driver died during that race, possibly in an on screen crash, and the winner died almost three weeks later in another race. This benefit was therefore a real event, including many 'freak races' 'including a foot-auto-horse and bicycle race, quart of gas race, dress up race, quarter-mile slow race in high gear, exhibition mile, tug of war between motor trucks, and junior race.' Attendees paid fifty cents per ticket, even members of the press, so the 5,000 who showed up raised $2,500 for the injured men.

Of course, the third and last deliberate meaning of the title refers to Charlie Chaplin and Mack Swain, as they attempt to find their way into the event without paying, just as Charlie managed to do in the earlier picture. Everywhere I look seems to identify the two as friends, but they don't seem to be; they're merely both trying to do the same thing at the same time. There is some humour in their interaction, but mostly it was the bystanders who engrossed me. Gentlemen of Nerve was the fourth Chaplin picture at Keystone to be shot on location during real auto races and it's been fascinating to watch how the regular audience interacted with what he did. During Kid Auto Races at Venice, shot in January, nobody had a clue who he was because he wouldn't appear on screen until February and so they watched the races instead, at least for a while. By the end of May, when Mabel's Busy Day was shot, they knew exactly who he was and they watched him instead. Here in October, they're lining up to see what he has in store and he plays that up.

Mack Swain was a talented comedian, as we've seen in many of Chaplin's Keystone shorts, but he's more of a lumbering ox here without anything much to warrant his presence. It's telling that his best scene by far is the one where he tries to get into the races through the gap made by a missing board in a wall. He gets stuck, naturally, and nothing seems to help, not even the time honoured Keystone boot to the rear, which Charlie attempts a number of times before handing over the reins to the cop who shows up to try to pull him back. The best bit about the scene is Charlie clearly getting fed up with the wait and crawling through Swain's legs instead. The next best is how the folk in the makeshift bar on the other side of the wall act once he shows up. One lady passes him a seltzer bottle, which he puts to good use, though its spray mysteriously attains the power of fire hose when it goes through the gap in the wall to hit the cop in the face on the outside. None of the best bits are Swain's and yet this is his best part of the picture.

For such a throwaway short film, the cast is a strong one. Before Chaplin shows up to start shenanigans at the gate, we've watched Mabel Normand and her beau for this picture, Chester Conklin, pay their way in and sit down to watch the fun. Unfortunately, they sit right next to Phyllis Allen, who flirts up a storm with Chester and pisses Mabel off no end. Of course, with Mabel on his arm, we really have no idea why Conklin is interested in this flirtatious woman; Conklin was born in 1886, so Normand, a former postcard model and bathing beauty, was six years his junior, while Allen, a bulky battleaxe, was a full quarter of a century older. None of it makes any sense, but it is at least mildly amusing until Normand elevates it by orchestrating her revenge by neatly stamping on her competitor's foot. She elevates the picture in this sort of way a couple of times more as it runs on too, the other times opposite Chaplin rather than Allen. That she steals both of those scenes highlights her talent well.

Mostly though, I wasn't watching the cast, I was watching the audience. Swain is only used for his bulk, while Conklin is given ridiculous scenes to set up Normand, but as good as she is here, she's not given a lot to do. Chaplin is the focus, of course, at least once he actually shows up, which is a surprising amount of time into the picture, but even when he's shining, he's generally shining in front of a host of folk who can't wait to see what he's going to do. Beyond being the next step in the progression of how audiences saw Chaplin's star rising, there are two reasons why this is interesting. One is that Keystone weren't just here to shoot a film, they were here to be part of the event too and it's clear that Chaplin was playing to the crowd. The other is that there are ringers dotted amongst it, so that he can interact with them. Who they are, I have no idea, but it was fun trying to figure out which were Keystone actors and which regular members of the audience. There's a great interactive scene where Charlie antagonises some of them.

There are other strong moments too. One minor but enjoyable one involves Charlie and Mabel, who has ditched the unattentive Chester for the overly attentive Charlie, and an amazing vehicle, identified by a sign as the Franklin Wind Machine. It's a large automobile with a huge propellor on the front; as Charlie leans on the latter, it knocks off his hat, and when it's started up, both he and Mabel are blown away. In an earlier scene, before Mabel finds her way to Charlie, he sits down by another girl who has a drink with a straw; he cleverly sneaks enough of it while she isn't looking that she eventually just gives it to him. I particularly liked the scene where Conklin's character kisses Allen's and she goes ballistic, but that's as much for the reaction of the crowd around them as it is for the characters. These various moments help to keep the picture a lot more interesting than Mabel's Busy Day and perhaps the best of them is left for last, as Charlie aims to kiss Mabel, only for her to rebuff him in a great scene-stealing moment.

Sadly, these moments are peppered through a notably weaker film than usual. It's a racing film without any real racing, though there is one beautifully atmospheric shot of cars lined up for a tyre change race, half hidden by smoke. While Chaplin is more sympathetic here than in Mabel's Busy Day, he's still firmly back in obnoxious mode and there are a couple of notably violent moments that feel more like the first half of his year at the studio than the second: in one he bites Conklin's nose and in the other pokes a lit cigarette onto Swain's. Who nose why those seemed appropriate at this point in time, when his general direction was away from that sort of thing. The editing is notably rough, like a workprint not a polished film. Mostly the whole thing is a long string of déjà vu as it's all reminiscent of, if not outright replicated from, a host of earlier Chaplin films. We might be able to bend a little, this being part of a charity event, though I don't know the financial details, but we can't fully forgive the relentless familiarity of it all.

Incidentally, Chaplin's character name here is Mr Wow-Wow, which doesn't seem to have any connection to the film at all. Instead it was sourced from the Fred Karno sketch, The Wow Wows, which the impresario had written specifically for an American audience and chosen for his company (at the time including not only Chaplin but also Stanley Jefferson, later to become Stan Laurel) to play when they toured the United States in 1910, though they had all advised him against it. A skit on secret societies like the freemasons, it played fairly well but failed to engage with audiences and Karno found much greater success after he replaced The Wow Wows with Mumming Birds, retitled A Night in an English Music Hall, which was a tour de force for Chaplin, the reason Mack Sennett sought him out for Keystone and from which he borrowed for a number of films for the studio, most especially The Knockout. He didn't do the same with The Wow Wows but, from his choice of character name here, it apparently resonated with him at least a little.

Important Sources:
Anon - Horseless Age: The Automobile Trade Magazine, Volume 34 (2011)
David Robinson - Chaplin, the Mirror of Opinion (1983)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Gentlemen of Nerve can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.

Dough and Dynamite (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Stars: Charlie Chaplin and Chester Conklin

I'm reviewing each of the 36 films Charlie Chaplin made for Keystone Studios in 1914 on the centennial of their original releases. Here's an index to these reviews.

If Those Love Pangs was a lesser film in Chaplin's filmography, there's good reason; all the best material had been left out, marked instead for this film. That picture had aimed to set him and Chester Conklin up as screen rivals for the attentions of their landlady, without any real idea of how that was going to unfold. Chaplin developed the idea of them working at a bakery and that soon grew into such promising material that it was shifted out to be a separate picture, this one. Those Love Pangs was therefore developed once again, was shot quickly in only four days and ended up feeling much like an afterthought, albeit one that benefitted from Chaplin's continued growth as a filmmaker; he endowed it with enough interesting detail that it doesn't feel unworthy of attention. It's immediately obvious that Dough and Dynamite completely overshadows it, though, as Jeffrey Vance ably highlights: 'In the early silent-film era,' he explains, 'Dough and Dynamite was generally regarded as one of the greatest of all Hollywood comedies.'

He also calls it 'perhaps the most important comedy Chaplin made in his early ascent to screen stardom and the most profitable of all the Keystone two-reel comedies.' These are powerful but deceptively simple words that deserve to be expanded. Most of Chaplin's Keystone films were one-reelers, which describes both their length and their importance. A reel is a single magazine containing one thousand feet of film. In the sound era, reels were projected at 24 frames per second, which meant that one reel amounted to eleven minutes or so of material. Back in the days of the silents, projection was slower, varying between 16 and 22 frames per second, so that reel played for longer, as much as fourteen or fifteen minutes. Two-reelers took up twice as much film and twice as much running time, so were reserved for more important pictures. While Chaplin had acted in a few, he had only previously made one as a director, The Property Man. Both Those Love Pangs and Dough and Dynamite were initially slated for one reel only.

In his autobiography, Chaplin explains that he went notably overbudget, never a good sign for a director. Mack Sennett expected each Keystone picture to cost under a thousand dollars, but Dough and Dynamite bloated up to eighteen hundred, losing Chaplin his $25 bonus for bringing it in under budget. That sort of thing might have cost him more, such as the creative freedom he had to continue writing and directing his own pictures, but the result was recognised by unprecedented success at the box office. In his own words: 'The only way they could retrieve themselves, said Sennett, would be to put it out as a two-reeler, which they did, and it grossed more than one hundred and thirty thousand dollars the first year.' With the film making that much money, no wonder Chaplin remained in charge of his own films. However, Sennett fought the idea that spending more opened up the possibility of earning more, one prominent reason why Chaplin was already seeking a new employer, even as he was bringing his brother, Sydney, to Keystone.

If he was spending more money than his boss wanted, Chaplin was at least becoming more efficient as a filmmaker. Shooting of The Property Man ran over seventeen days, not counting any taken off, but Dough and Dynamite took only fourteen, beginning on 29th August and ending on 11th September, unfortunate for a film that ends with a successful terrorist attack. Chaplin's autobiography cites nine of those days as being shooting days, but there's so much crammed into the film, which runs almost half an hour, that it's amazing to think of how quickly the complex choreography must have been mastered. It's that interplay between characters that leaps out the most in this picture, not only in how well it's done but in how much of it there is and how constantly it continues. While the action does escalate, as we might expect, to that explosive finalé, it feels much more natural in its progression than usual and it's paced magnificently. We breathe easily throughout, even as we're given a constant barrage of slapstick.

Charlie is a waiter again, this time at a bakery with its own restaurant, and he's about as effective at it as usual. He starts out collecting plates from tables but is so absent-minded that he collects one that's only just been delivered, scraping leftovers from other plates onto it before the customer is able to take a bite. Within forty busy seconds, he's reprimanded by the customer, apologises for his actions, returns his food, retrieves the leftovers with his fingers and drops some in the man's lap, samples what's left and wipes his fingers on both his own trousers and the customer's jacket. This scene highlights just how much is going on in this picture. While it's an ancient critic's cliché to suggest that viewers shouldn't blink or they'll miss something, it's fundamentally true in this picture as the detail continues to be this dense throughout and it rarely lets up. In fact, there's a great deal of prestaging going on here: often what seem like throwaway mistakes turn out to be carefully setting up later moments, but more of that later.

Of course the sense of hygiene is terrible: Gordon Ramsey would be horrified and we haven't even found our way down to the kitchen yet. That's downstairs, through a trapdoor set in the floor of the main dining area, opposite the door to the kitchen. There's no way that that could go horribly wrong, huh? Well, at this point, the place seems to be running very smoothly, Charlie being the only spanner in the works or fly in the ointment, driven both by laziness and an eye for the ladies. He promptly leaves that customer with a collection of plates because a lovely young creature has just wandered up to the front, its counter display neatly labelled 'Assorted French Tarts'. This allows him to both imitate her enticing sway and play havoc with a plate of pastries, one naturally flying through the air with the greatest of ease onto the face of the very same beleaguered customer Charlie had already caused so much trouble for. We're only two scenes in and both props and people (not that there's much difference) are already being re-used and built upon.

It's not surprising to see why audiences loved this one. The slapstick arrives quickly and while it's hardly high brow stuff, it's impeccably timed, carefully choreographed and continues on unabated. Even though many of these moves, especially those within fights, are routine ones that we've seen many times before and not only in Chaplin's films either, they're put to use magnificently and, if the film is a piece of music, they serve ably as its beats. There's a real rhythm here that goes far beyond anything achieved in any of the earlier Chaplin shorts and it persists for much longer. Where most Keystone films begin with an idea that spawns action and escalates rapidly into a frantic chase scene, Chaplin had already been aiming for a different approach for some time and here finally mastered his counter. This feels more like a dance, in which the tempo is just as important as the choreography and the end result grows as much through the expansion of participants and scope than the moves they make.

Chaplin's growing sophistication is highlighted not only through the number of participants who actually have something to do here but through how he introduces them. Keystone pictures were never known for their subtlety, so characters tended to have one function and they showed up just in time to perform it. In this picture, many have a whole bunch of scenes in which they do very little except act naturally until the moment they're called upon to shine. The story even has a grand sweep that actually makes sense within the logic of the film, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense outside of it. Even if the idea of Charlie and his partner in crime, played by Chester Conklin, being elevated from mere waiters to replace the entire staff of bakers, was prompted by industrial action really sweeping Los Angeles at the time, as Vance suggests, I'm at a loss to see how striking bakers might better find their demands met by blowing up the places at which they work. Chaplin was oustpoken politically but this doesn't feel like social comment.

Instead it feels like simplification. This unnamed bakery is run by Fritz Schade and his wife Norma Nichols. Chaplin and Conklin are their waiters, while Cecile Arnold and maybe Peggy Page are the waitresses. Jess Dandy in drag is the astoundingly homely cook, reminding very much of the female characters comedian Les Dawson would play many decades later. All these are portrayed in a neutral light, as neither good nor bad, as are the customers, played by Vivian Edwards, Phyllis Allen and Charles Parrott, who had not yet become Charley Chase. The bakers, led by Glen Cavender and including Slim Summerville and possibly Edgar Kennedy, among others, are the ones with emotional bias. They 'want less work and more pay', as an intertitle highlights, and though there's nothing to suggest whether their demands are fair or not, it's clear that their subsequent actions aren't. They storm out, gesticulating wildly, then buy a loaf of bread, stuff it with dynamite and have a little girl return it to the bakery for them. Oh yes, they're villains!

With that framework outlined, you can imagine the rest yourselves. However, your imagination might fall short for a change, as this one's a marvel, the scenario written by Chaplin but apparently in collaboration with Sennett, who didn't have any of the subtlety on show here. The choreography, tempo and attention detail surely all belong to Chaplin; I can't see what Sennett might have contributed, unless it was gags. There are strong setpieces, like one where Charlie parades up and down in front of Schade with a tray of loaves on his head. We're impressed by his achievement but still believe that he slips up and drops one until we realise that it's all a setup; he leans over to retrieve it and promptly loses the rest. Another has Charlie effectively handcuffing himself behind his back with dough, having to climb through his arms to escape. There are setpieces in many of Chaplin's early films though; more of them, however well done, aren't groundbreaking. What I found new here were the more subtle things in the background.

Some tied to reuse of props. Another apparently throwaway moment that I thought was a mistake arrived when a baker attempts to transfer dough from a vat to a table to knead and instead lets most of it fall on the floor. It's ignored for a while, as if it never happened, but later it comes into focus when Chester slips on it and then again when Charlie picks it up and throws it back into the vat, highlighting the ineptitude of the waiters and their horrible approach to industrial hygiene. Other subtleties tie to gradual discovery too, but by us catching up to them rather than the plot. One of my favourite moments came after Charlie finishes cleaning up the kitchen and sits down on a large sack of flour. Only then did I realise that Chester Conklin had been in the scene all along, still pinned underneath it after Charlie had dropped it down the stairs onto him a little earlier. To me, this highlighted just how much Chaplin was becoming totally aware of everything going on in his films, so that he could best use those details to this sort of effect.

Something else that leapt out at me here is the completely democratic manner in which abuse is dished out. While we know the Little Tramp today as a sympathetic creature, he could be and often was actively obnoxious in some of his earlier pictures. Critics have called out instances where he heaps violent abuse on some character or other in a completely one-sided act that's often impossible to justify. Here, nobody escapes! Chaplin is on the receiving end just as much as he's dishing it out, as is Conklin. The waitresses may escape more than most but they get theirs too, as does the boss, the cook and even the customers, some of whom also get a few notable shots in of their own. Of course, the bakers receive plenty, just as they dish out plenty, including the explosive grand finalé. I can easily imagine Sennett dishing some out to Chaplin too, off screen for notably failing to keep within budget, but Chaplin, who certainly delivered here his best film thus far, clearly had the last word: a hundred and thirty thousand of them.

Important Sources:
Charlie Chaplin - My Autobiography (1964)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Dough and Dynamite can be viewed for free on YouTube or downloaded in a number of formats from the Internet Archive.

To see the restored versions of Chaplin's Keystone films in all their glory, it's highly recommended that you pick up the Flicker Alley box set, Chaplin at Keystone. It omits only Her Friend the Bandit, which is considered a lost film, and half of A Thief Catcher, which was previously thought lost but now recovered; the full version debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.