Laughing Gas (1914)

Director: Charles Chaplin
Star: Charlie Chaplin

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.

However Chaplin experts decide to divide up his early pictures into sections, and there are more than a few ways to do that when over half of them are clearly a first something or other, we can't avoid this one being a pivotal moment of change, possibly the most important one after his first picture and his first as the Little Tramp. His first twenty shorts were directed by a variety of directors and written by a variety of writers, with the size and quality of Chaplin's off-screen contributions open to debate. He did contribute to his films from the beginning but often not much and what he did bring to the table didn't necessarily make it into the finished product. It took him a dozen films to get the chance to sit in the director's chair, on Twenty Minutes of Love, but he had to share that honour with Joseph Maddern. He flew solo on short number fourteen, Caught in the Rain, but then Mack Sennett stepped in to direct the next half a dozen. From Laughing Gas on though, he would never be directed by anyone else on a short film again.

Already established as an actor and screen comedian, this could be seen as his coming of age picture as a filmmaker, appropriately given that it was his 21st. Credits here start to mirror what we might expect of a Chaplin film, or at least they would if Keystone pictures had credits in 1914. It was directed by Chaplin, written by Chaplin and starring Chaplin, with nobody else really getting much of a look in. The cast does include Mack Swain and Slim Summerville, both regular names at Keystone, but they're in minor roles, as indeed is everyone else. Having played second fiddle in his last three pictures, once to Roscoe Arbuckle and twice to Mabel Normand, there's no mistaking who the star of this movie is, from the very moment Chaplin, in familiar tramp attire, swaggers into Dr Pain's dental surgery and exudes authority, taking off his hat and gloves as if he expects a servant to put them away for him. Surely he's Dr Pain himself! No, that's just a setup; Chaplin is playing with us from moment one.

It turns out that he's merely an assistant and not the only one either, as there's another in the back room waiting for him. I'm not sure quite what this fellow is supposed to be, but if it wasn't for a prominent and strong moustache, I wouldn't have said he'd made it to his teenage years yet. Chaplin wasn't a tall man, only a mere 5' 5", but he towers over his fellow assistant by a foot or so. Either the actor, who seems to be a Joseph Sutherland in possibly his only film appearance, was of seriously diminutive height (though perfectly proportioned with it) or he's really a young lad transparently pretending to be an adult for some reason or other that is never explained. Your guess is as good as mine, but it seems strange in the cruel days of slapstick that Keystone would not take advantage of attributes so apparent and work them into the script. Physical uniqueness was always highlighted; that's why actors like Arbuckle, Summerville and Swain were so important to the studio: as fat, thin and large actors respectively.

Whatever the explanation, we're certainly kept on the hop as Laughing Gas gets moving and get moving we do. While the camera is still a static creature and the editing hardly imaginative, this is a smooth ride throughout. Even when chaos erupts towards the end, as was almost compulsory at this point in time, we watch it unfold in a smooth and controlled manner. While the worst jumps in 1914 pictures tend to be due to poor quality public domain prints with frames or even reels missing, watching the remastered versions of Chaplin's Keystone films highlights that sometimes jumps were there all along because editing wasn't close to being the art that it would become. I wonder how much of this was due to Chaplin, who talked in his autobiography about the 'primary rules', that 'if one exited right from a scene, one came in left in the next scene' and so on. He mentions these before philosophy about camera placement that he learned as he went, so he's treating these as gimmes. Yet his earlier films don't always follow those gimmes.

That's not to suggest that there aren't technical difficulties even here, because there are. Dr Pain's lobby was constructed cheaply even for a Keystone set, because the books are clearly painted onto what aims to pass for a bookcase and so is the mantel clock on top of it. The Rasputin beard on one patient is more outrageously fake than even the norm at this studio which was renowned for its fake facial hair. However, there's less to obviously stand out as problematic here and more that just moves on so smoothly that we wonder why this wasn't regular for Keystone up until this point. Even Chaplin's moves are clearly getting slicker, his famous stagger as he rounds a corner or bounces to a stop is better and used more here than previously. The inevitable pratfalls as people push others over are handled efficiently, even when there's a foot difference between assistants. Sutherland does well to push Chaplin over, just as Chaplin does well not to castrate the much taller Mack Swain when kicking him in the belly.

Eventually the real dentist shows up, of course, in the form of German-born Fritz Schade in a top hat and monocle and with the overdone acting style that might suggest. This was his first Chaplin picture, though he'd show up in eight of the remaining fifteen. He had a presence to him that lent itself to certain types, but even a quick glance at the variety of roles he racked up between 1913 and 1918 show that he was a versatile addition to the Keystone roster. It's here that we get down to the sort of dental shenanigans we might have expected from the outset. I expected a lot more of this than we get, as the story is a restless creature that constantly adds new elements without forgetting what it is. Chaplin's script is much more ambitious than the one he wrote for Caught in the Rain; that felt like a frantic sprint through every stock situation he'd seen by that point, while this is a more controlled stride through scenarios familiar or not. The familiar sections are generally the more manic ones, while the sensitive ones feel newer.

What's more, Caught in the Rain was a very traditional picture in that the inspirations were all taken from previous films. Here, there's a lot more, as Jeffrey Vance highlights in Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema. One key influence was a vaudeville sketch named 'The Dentist' that Chaplin knew well from his time on stage with Fred Karno, though he never performed it himself. Of course even this was far from original; as Vance points out, 'dentistry and tooth extraction have been a source of humor since the commedia dell'arte.' A further influence was personal, as Chaplin apparently had a bee in his bonnet about dentists; in his later years, his family struggled to get him to visit them. These sources, combined with more traditional movie slapstick and ideas that earlier directors might have jettisoned, show that Chaplin was far more confident in his writing than he was only a couple of months earlier when writing Caught in the Rain. Of course, this bodes well for the films he was yet to make at Keystone; let's see how much he grows before he leaves.

The best moments in the film are the ones that revolve around women, unsurprisingly from what we now know about Chaplin's predilections. Sure, he has fun knocking people over and stepping over them, and he gets a good scene with an anesthetised patient and a mallet, initially using it to wake him up and then to knock him back out again, but it's the scenes with girls that shine the brightest. One sees him follow a pretty woman on the street, who he doesn't yet know is his boss's wife, only to slip and rip her dress off on the steps to a building. Alice Howell shines in this physical role, making it no shock to find that Stan Laurel called her one of the ten greatest screen comediennes. Another has Charlie flirting up a storm with a patient played by Helen Carruthers, whose 21 films in 1914 and 1915 include a dozen with Chaplin. He uses an dental extraction tool on her nose to turn her head towards his so he can steal a peck or two. It's a huge contrast with the scene where he uses it for its intended purpose, naturally with much violence.

This is still formative Chaplin, but it may well mark the point where he starts to benefit from a little more creative freedom than he had experienced previously. There's certainly some classic Charlie in here, just packed in tight with more traditional blatant material. Even there I wonder about how some of that was shot. There have been brick throwing battles in a bunch of Chaplin's earlier films, but as brutal as those scenes often are, we don't tend to see blood or damage. Here, with only two bricks thrown, we get teeth conspicuously knocked out of two different faces. Sure, it's a short set in a dentist's office, but still, it's a new edge to an old gag and when you work through whole batches of Keystone pictures, a new edge is always a good edge because the repetition can be mind-numbing. For all its faults, this feels somewhat refreshing. Perhaps that's underlined by the scene with Charlie on top of a patient in the chair, yanking a tooth out with force. It's the most expected scene in the movie, but here it's merely a minor moment.

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

Laughing Gas can be watched for free at 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 will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in August.

Death Factory (2002)

Director: Brad Sykes
Stars: Lisa Jay, Karla Zamudio, Jeff Ryan, David Kalamus, Rhoda Jordan, Jason Flowers, Ron Jeremy and Tiffany Shepis

It's about time I saw this film, which was, at least at one point, the best selling title on the Brain Damage catalogue. Somehow I've never got round to it, though I've seen its sequel a few times, most memorably at Phoenix Fear Fest back in 2008, and it's still a guilty pleasure of mine. Unfortunately the imagination of the sequel isn't matched by the original, which is a thoroughly routine slasher with one saving grace, the rather unique monster, which was the only element Sean Tretta rendered far more conventional when he revisited this picture with his sequel, The Death Factory Bloodletting in 2008. In that film, she was played by Michelle Mousel as a young lady in a hot outfit apparently built out of leather straps, with sharp teeth and sharp metal claws attached to her fingers. Here, she's a demonic Goth chick with clown white make up and she's played by Tiffany Shepis early in her career. Her teeth are just as sharp but the metalwork on her hands is far less stylish and more grounded in freaky and unwieldy wired medical contraptions.

Her back story is by far the most interesting part about the script, which is otherwise stunningly routine. She was formerly Alexa, a young factory worker at Dyson Chemical, who made chemical weapons on the outskirts of town and did it poorly enough that she was exposed to a radioactive spill. Dyson denied all responsibility, no doubt because everything they were doing was completely illegal, and just wanted to cover the whole thing up, but she mutated into this freakily original creature and returned to the factory to wreak her vengeance. '24 people, all brutally butchered... and they never found the killer,' explains one character as a sort of fireside story that, in a horror movie like this, naturally turns out to be true, if surrounded by the inconsistency that riddles the script. Apparently people die all the time in this factory but nobody has been there for years. Try to correlate all these details and you'll send yourself insane. You just won't look anywhere near as cool as Shepis while you do so.

None of the rest of the cast look as cool as Shepis either. They're the sort of actors you might expect to be playing characters in a movie like this, one obviously shot on videotape in a 4:3 ratio with surprisingly decent sound but overdone colour. When we see skin, which is quite often, it's far too red as if the people we're watching spent the previous day out in the Arizona sun and forgot their SPF vampire suntan lotion. Then again Alyson and her boyfriend aren't likely to care too much because they're only a token necking couple for the monster to kill off at the beginning of the film. They're only given three simple things to do. Alyson needs to get the pair of them into the factory somehow. Allison Beal needs to take off her top for a while so we have something to look at. Then they need to die. I appreciated writer/director Brad Sykes's choice to not reveal the monster fully at this point and the neat role reversal where it's the guy who's the wuss wanting out. I didn't appreciate the ten minutes Alexa took to slice them up. At least it feels that long.

If we're looking at anything except Beal's boobs and Shepis's claws, we're noticing a pretty cool set. The venue was apparently a haunted house attraction, used out of season with many of its props serving as the set decoration but without any of the more extreme stuff on show because it wouldn't fit. Bizarrely, as much as this place adds a great deal to the disused tone of the film, it doesn't seem to fit itself. None of it looks remotely industrial; what sort of factory has chairs, beds and couches like these? Or were the winos who break into the place to die flush with a convenient collection of antiques to haul into the building to destroy? I never bought into the location for this film, but do agree that it's a pretty cool place to shoot a horror flick; it just shouldn't have been this one. Sykes is a prolific filmmaker, so he probably returned to it for another movie where it may have fit better. Then again, we're asked to buy into a lot here. The most believable aspect was to find Ron Jeremy playing a crippled wino. He missed his true calling.

The next big stretch is to believe that the various schoolkids who decide to party on down at the factory just because are a) schoolkids and b) schoolkids who hang out together. There are three vaguely defined couples, which makes it a pretty small party, but there's beer and boobs and weed, so we don't complain too much. Derek likes Rachel and she likes him enough for them to be dating, but apparently he's not a priority. Troy likes Louisa but she really doesn't like him, so he just clings in the hope that, in the absence of anyone else, he might just get lucky. Rachel and Louisa hang out together, even though Derek hates it, maybe because Derek hates it. Partly he hates it because he's a squeaky clean nice guy and Louisa likes to show her knife a lot because it makes her look tough. Partly it's because she really does seem to be a bad influence; she seems to only exist to tell Troy no and hurl schoolkid insults at Rachel like suggesting that she's 'clean, sober and a virgin'. That leaves Francis and Leticia, who are at least a real couple.

Francis looks way too old to have just finished school, but he apparently still lives with his parents and is dumb enough to have forgotten when they're away for the weekend. So much for the party at his place, which is why Louisa throws out the factory down on Duncan Rd as a substitute because she used to go there eight years ago. To be fair, I've heard a lot worse reasons in slasher movies but that doesn't mean this is a good one. The six of them head down there, Derek only to protect Rachel and Troy only because Louisa can't say no forever, right? For a while we get all the expected scenes in the expected order. They wander around and bump into spider webs and such for little shock moments. They split up to see if they can get the power switched on. They party for a while, because Francis has a beatbox and some weed, while Derek and Troy bring some beer. And then we get the campfire tale which explains why we're here and introduces Alexa to the story properly. Now we're all set for the main reason for the film: gore.

We've seen a little already, what with the extended death scene at the beginning and Ron Jeremy getting his still beating heart ripped out right in front of Alyson, covered in blood and still screaming herself. The hairy hedgehog gets less screen time here than he does in the blue movies he's better known for. We just know we're going to get more gore though, because none of these six 'kids' are remotely bright enough to make it out alive and we don't want them to anyway. We're firmly rooting for Alexa like the gorehounds we are. Of course, we don't mind them splitting up, stripping off, getting jiggy with it first, but they have to die eventually because that's the main reason we're watching this film. Well, to be fair, nowadays we'll watch to see what Shepis was doing this early in her career, and she is by far the best thing about Death Factory, but back in 2002 nobody really knew who she was so they were watching to see six more people wind up dead in horribly bloody ways. At least the film can deliver on some fronts.

As the body count adds up, Sykes does try to give us a little more than the expected, but I don't believe many audience members really cared. Most of it left me dry, because the characters weren't drawn well enough for me to care about whether this one leaves their supposed friends high and dry or that one has hidden depths as a hero. The only bit that connected at all was the bit I wasn't expecting, which made it a surprisingly capable twist. It's odd to realise that this film had nothing to begin with but built throughout and did find a little bit of substance by the end, while the sequel began with everything but gradually fell apart as it moved on. Perhaps it's all about expectation. Sykes didn't give us any at all while Tretta maybe gave us too much. Tretta's film is light years ahead of this one but from that perspective anything Sykes gave us before the end credits would have felt like a win; while Tretta set us up to believe we might have a cult classic on our hands, only to fail to deliver on that potential.

If we think back to what came before that decent twist, we can't fail to note the poor acting (though I've certainly seen a lot worse), the clichéd characters and the predictable plot (up to that point, at least). The positive side is pretty sparse. Certainly the amount of blood is a plus, because we get a lot of it. Sadly the gore effects themselves aren't that great: there are some good moments with blood spurting out of necks but we do wonder how Alexa's knife fingers can generate so much of it when they're apparently unable to penetrate skin. The fact that Ron Jeremy dies quickly and horribly is definitely a plus too. Almost entirely though, it's Tiffany Shepis who shines, not as the scream queen we might expect but as the monster. She looks thoroughly different with her short hair, bleached face and wild contact lenses, not to mention her sharp teeth and spiderlike medical attachments on her arms. She also overplays things so much that we wonder if she's in a haunted house attraction rather than a movie. Ah, now I understand the setting...

The Prometheus Project (2010)

Director: Sean Tretta
Stars: Tiffany Shepis, Louis Mandylor, Scott Anthony Leet, Patti Tindall, Jonathan Northover, Sebastian Kunnappilly, Noah Todd, Joe Ricci, Zena Otsuka and Ed Lauter

I'm asking major filmmakers to pick two movies from their careers for me to review here at Apocalypse Later. Here's an index to the titles they chose.

My previous review at Apocalypse Later was of the first of the 52 Films in 52 Weeks that Travis Mills and Running Wild Films made during 2013. That was a major challenge that they both set and met and I felt I should follow in that spirit by reviewing them all over a similar period, starting this July: a 52 Films in 52 Weeks in 52 Reviews project. When I decided to do that, I strongly felt that I should accompany it with a similar project, to review 52 other films, all local Arizona features not made by Running Wild, within the same 52 week period. The Prometheus Project was the obvious choice to kick it off, because it comprises the second half of yet another project I'm kicking into high gear, the Make It a Double project to review pairs of films selected by major names in the industry from their respective filmographies. Tiffany Shepis was the first person I asked to participate, back at Phoenix FearCon V in 2012; I've already reviewed her first choice, The Hazing, but for some reason hadn't got round to following up with her second, this film.

What's more, I was very happy that she chose it because it's not only a Tiffany Shepis picture, it's also a Hal Astell picture. Well, sort of. I'm hardly a featured player, but if you pay close attention indeed (and to do so, you'll need to pause and frame advance carefully), you might just catch a glimpse of my left arm banging on the metal in an underground cage fight scene. No I wasn't fighting; this was my first film as an extra and seeing my name in the credits at the Phoenix Film Festival was a special moment indeed. At that time, the picture was known as The Prometheus Project, an appropriate title for various reasons, not least its roots in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: A Modern Prometheus and the mythical Greek character of the title, a Titan who stole fire from the gods to benefit mankind. Fearing that nobody abroad would know who Prometheus was, the picture's distributor changed that title to The Frankenstein Syndrome, only to promptly change it back again after the prominent international release of Ridley Scott's Prometheus.

Beyond causing needless confusion, it's a shame that they fought the original title because it highlights a whole new level for Sean Tretta, who wrote, directed, produced and edited. Known for three prior pictures, this was a notable step forward on every front: the cast, the budget, the ambition. Yes, The Death Factory Bloodletting is a notable guilty pleasure of mine but, let's face it, it wasn't a great movie and it never had any delusions about that. This one aches to be a great movie and the stars aligned to make that possible. I'd have to say that it fails in its quest for greatness, but it's still a notable success. It's written well, with a host of telling homages to Mary Shelley's novel and a lot more complexity than is usual for a Frankenstein movie. It's talky but never slow and it builds steadily to a powerful finalé. There are negatives too, but I'll get to those soon enough. The point here is that the film aimed a great deal higher than anything Tretta had attempted previously and it achieved a good deal of what it aimed for.

Those homages arrive early, after a brief flashback to Shepis's character, dressed in scrubs and running around a hospital which appears mostly deserted except for blood, corpses and whoever is chasing her. She's Dr Elizabeth Barnes and she survives the night but, when the FBI come to interview her two years later, she's confined to a wheelchair and hiding her disfigured features behind a mask. Agents Godwin and Wollestonecraft want to know about her work for Dr Walton and all three names are clearly sourced from Frankenstein or its author, as is the concept of framing the story around her deposition, a modern equivalent to the letters that so often framed Gothic novels like Shelley's. Shane Dean's clipped speech works really well here as an FBI interrogator, light years away from the neo-Nazi he played in The Death Factory Bloodletting for Tretta a mere two years earlier. So, alongside the FBI, we begin to peel away the layers to find out where this story is going to take us.

It starts with Walton, a doctor with a special interest in his work because he's also suffering from cancer. He's set up a research effort called the Prometheus Project because he sees a parallel between the gift of fire and his attempts to develop a regenerative healing serum. He sees both as the power of God, surely a giveaway as to where it's inevitably going to go horribly wrong. Barnes, a stem cell researcher with a degree in molecular biology, is only one of the talented young things recruited to take part and Walton's ability to headhunt the best and brightest is mirrored by the fact that Walton is played by Ed Lauter, not a name from the level Tretta could hire from previously. Another giveaway that this is a horror/sci-fi movie rather than a straight drama is that the first people she meets are security and the first things she hears are rules to ensure the secrecy of the project. Don't ask any questions. Don't go into the basement. Don't leave the building. Talk about a horror movie checklist!

The other people locked in with the horrors which will come are a varied lot. The lead surgeon is William McKennin, played by Jonathan Northover, who I recognise from Jaz Garewal shorts like Present Tense. He's politely British and welcoming. Dr Neeraj Sahir is also welcoming, indeed enthusiastic about working with Barnes. Sebastian Kunnappilly was Shepis's client in the wonderful M is for Matchmaker, a finalist in the ABC's of Death 2 competition and the only film Tretta has directed since this. Ira Gordon is the late Noah Todd, playing a data systems expert with a jokey sense of humour that he couldn't use as the religious freak in The Death Factory Bloodletting. He died the same year this film was released and it's dedicated to him. That leaves Patti Tindall, the lead in Tretta's Death of a Ghost Hunter, as Dr Victoria Travelle, who interned with Walton out of college and is jealous of anyone else's potential. We know immediately that she and the newcomer are going to clash hard. 'Competition is the mother of invention,' explains Walton.

Backing them up are a couple of other names from out of state. Prolific Aussie actor Louis Mandylor plays Marcus Grone, Walton's right hand man and one of only two people with access to the basement; Travelle is the other, of course. With a string of credits as long as my arm, he's a lot more recognisable than Scott Anthony Leet to me, but many would know the latter from his previous career as a punter in the NFL, with stints at both the St Louis Rams and the Dallas Cowboys. He's David Doyle, the huge Irish security guard who was fighting in the cage that I got to rattle in my extra scene. He's a very believable tough guy, even when not acting. While I sat back and read a book while waiting for the next take in which I was needed, he kept doing apparently effortless pressups to keep a sweat on throughout. For at least four hours. Given how hard he worked to make this film, it's appropriate that he ends up dominating it, as you might expect from his patched up prominence on the posters.

That's not bad for someone who's shot dead with a head shot half an hour into the movie, but then every Frankenstein story needs its monster, right? Well, the Barnes vs Travelle rivalry has led to breakthroughs, although their first attempt at reanimating a recently deceased human being went violently wrong. Doyle becomes their second subject and things go a lot better. 'We need to be prepared for anything,' suggests Travelle, but she undestimates the case substantially and we have our story. Leet is a big guy at 6'2" but he seems even bigger as he enforces his presence during the second half of the film. He towers over the rest of the cast, not only through size (Shepis is only 5'3") but also through sheer force of will. It's odd at this point to ponder that Shepis is the lead in this film, even with Tindall as the Dr Frankenstein character and Leet as her monster. She's the narrator, outlining all this to the FBI interrogators, but she's also the film's conscience, meditating on the film's tagline, that 'the end justifies the means.'

What's most interesting about Shepis here is that she doesn't play the character we expect. She's playing the lead in a film directed by her husband but, beyond the discovery of a conscience, she doesn't grow as a character much at all. The opening scene shows her in the element in which we know her best, running away from something, as much as she doesn't scream the way we know she can. As it's a flashback, we'll see her back there, but she doesn't spend the majority of the film doing that and she's very strong in this uncharacteristic role. It shows how much she's an actor not just a scream queen. Tindall shines too, in the role of a bitch with hidden depths. Travelle is the most clinical character in the picture, the epitome of the dedicated scientist who walks over everyone and everything in her path in the name of saving them. Yet she's also the most overtly caring character, becoming a surrogate mother to the resurrected Doyle. The two women are constantly at odds, underpinned by the actors playing off each other wonderfully.

Compared to these two doctors and their subject, the rest of the cast struggle to make themselves seen. Each gets their moment in the spotlight, as does David C Hayes as a grinning weasel of a lawyer, but the moments don't last and each of them leaves the movie for long periods at a time. Lauter is used sparsely while Mandylor gets plenty of opportunity but is stuck with the most transparent character. Todd only gets one real scene of substance, as do Kunnappilly and Hayes. Northover is the only one given the chance to play with the leads but, while he does good work, he's overshadowed throughout. The story was always about Tindall and Leet, with Shepis playing most of the real roles around them: she's the hero and the victim, the human element but the first to really play God, the narrator and chronicler of events. Most of all, she's the conscience in a moral story heavily inspired by Shelley but well adapted to the modern day. Through Dr Elizabeth Barnes, she shows us that things really haven't changed that much since 1818.

The Sisters (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Noah Lanouette, John Miller, Mark DeBoer, Michelle Allen, Ron Foltz, Anne Gentry and Helen Sanger Pierce and Robert Peters

Having set himself the scarily ambitious task of making 52 short films in 52 short weeks, I have no doubt that Travis Mills understood how important the first of them would be, both practically and symbolically. It could be that the success of the entire project owes a great deal to the success of its first shoot, which is highlighted in the first episode of the web series Running Wild Films made as they went to document the project and maintain public interest in it. 'We never fell behind schedule, thanks to the cast and crew,' he noted confidently to the camera, adding, 'We did not rush or compromise quality and I believe we left this weekend with footage that will cut together into a good short film.' It is indeed a good film, though it's far from a great one. It could easily be described as a safe first picture to set the project in motion, with few set-ups, a host of short, mostly safe performances and with its ambition apparent mostly in what Mills changed from the source story, adding mild subversion and emphasising both beginning and growth.

Perhaps The Sisters works best as a beginning, which it became in so many ways. It was the first film shot for this project and the first to be screened at the three day festival during which all 52 films were shown. It was adapted from the first of the fifteen stories in James Joyce's 1914 collection, Dubliners, obviously a key work for Mills because he would go on to adapt every one of them for this project, almost entirely in order too. It was even the first story Joyce ever wrote, under the pseudonym of Stephen Dædulus back in 1904 for a weekly paper called The Irish Homestead. While there are a number of themes woven into the story, the main one is also concerned with a beginning, that of the adult life of the boy who recounts it, prompted by the death of an old man whom he had befriended. Mills even emphasises it in this version with the addition of an unlikely baptism and especially through use of the old man's pipe, not mentioned in the original story but here a strong symbol of the fascinating yet dangerous world of adulthood.

Unfortunately the writing is stronger than the performances tasked with bringing it to life, though, to be fair, none of the actors get enough screen time to allow them to get their teeth into their roles. Anchoring the piece is young actor Noah Lanouette, recently seen in two other impressive child-focused short films from different directors, Marcus Stricklin's The Tent and Darrin Moore's Technically Grounded. He has just the right combination of awkwardness and openness to work well as James and he maintains the focus of attention throughout, even with a mere two lines of dialogue, less than almost everyone else in the cast. While the story is always about James and the old man, deceased before the story begins, it's told by the adult characters talking either over or around him, as if he wasn't there. His ascent to adulthood may be realised best through the fact that, given the script's progression in Mills's contemporary adaptation, not one of them is likely to do it again.

The adults are all lesser characters, set in their ways and with little of interest to see. Michelle Allen has the toughest task as James's mother, because her character has only banalities to say. She looks fine but is too deliberate with her voice, too precise on her intonation. Her husband hasn't much to say either, but Mark DeBoer gifts him with a little more character, sprawling on a chair. It's Ron Foltz as the other adult in the conversation, who has much more to give us. He's smarmily pressing, insinuating inappropriateness between the boy and the old man. He makes 'He never got married' an accusation of both homosexuality and paedophilia, the overt choral music serving as a reminder that the old man in the Joyce story was an Irish Catholic priest with the sad century of revelations since underlining that insinuation. Anne Gentry is also strong as one of the old man's sisters, with just the right combination of elegaic sadness and cheery front. Helen Sanger Pierce is weaker as the other but still has her moments.

Of course, the only reason that Running Wild Films could even consider undertaking (no pun intended) a project as ambitious as this is the fact that their slim crew has become over a whole slew of short films, a well-oiled machine. When the pictures they enter into 48 hour film challenges are comparable in quality to those they take more time over, it's clear that they can do what they do quickly and efficiently. This is a strong film technically, the weakest link being the highly unambitious editing, comprised of lots of back and forth cuts of static shots. Perhaps the disconnection that approach suggests is appropriate, but there were opportunities for the camera to move and join in the story that weren't taken. Perhaps subconscious worry about adding complications to the first film in a long project might have contributed to that choice. Perhaps Mills and his crew just wanted to get this one in the can safely and move forward to longer and more ambitious films. The Sisters works well as a beginning, but it could easily have been more.

Mabel's Married Life (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand 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.

Mabel's Married Life arrived at the point where Chaplin was really starting to gain a semblance of control over his work. Most authorities list Mack Sennett as the film's director, thus marking the last time Chaplin would appear in a short film that he didn't direct himself, while others, like the British Film Institute, claim that it was Chaplin himself in the director's chair. Chaplin's handwritten filmography, reproduced in David Robinson's biography, Chaplin: His Life and Art, lists it as 'my own', though, as with his first possible foray into direction, Twenty Minutes of Love, this could well mean that he contributed as a writer rather than a director; certainly there's no argument that he wrote this with Mabel Normand. There's also little dispute that he took over as his own director as of his next short, Laughing Gas, and his only future movies which he didn't direct himself are Tillie's Punctured Romance, the one feature he made at Keystone, and a few odd others later on, like Camille or Souls for Sale, which contained Chaplin cameos or guest appearances.

Certainly this feels far more like a Chaplin film than a Sennett film, because the pace is surely the slowest of any of his twenty pictures thus far and the comedy is light enough that it almost plays out as a drama for much of the running time. It's firmly rooted in the Keystone standards, but they're often either ignored as mere background or handled in a slightly different way to usual. As Jeffrey Vance highlights in Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema, it's yet another Keystone short to be shot predominantly in Echo Park, located only five blocks south of their studios in Edendale, but, however close folk get at points, not one of them ends up in the Echo Park Lake. Another Keystone standard, the kick in the ass, is stunningly ineffective in this picture, Mack Swain shrugging off Chaplin's best efforts to distract and provoke him. Mabel Normand gets to spit on her hands and knuckle up and Chaplin gets to visit a bar, getting drunk yet again. He was a dab hand at this but it does start getting tiring after so many repetitions.

He clearly plays the Little Tramp here, though his usual derby is swapped out for a battered top hat, but the internal consistency seems a little lost. He's in his regular tight coat, dilapidated shoes and an even more baggy pair of trousers than usual, but he's living in what appears to be decent accommodation and he's married to the title character played by Mabel Normand. Harry McCoy, who played Mabel's boyfriend or husband in a number of 1914 pictures at Keystone, as early as Mabel's Strange Predicament, Chaplin's third film, is sidelined into a bit part as just a man in the bar which Charlie frequents. Putting Charlie and Mabel together as man and wife isn't just a combination of the two biggest draws at Keystone, it was also a counter to the antagonism of their last film together, Mabel's Busy Day, in which Charlie destroyed poor Mabel and her fledgling business with deliberate intent. Surprisingly, they're not a bickering couple here, not a happy relationship either, given Charlie's taste for the bottle, but one he's willing to fight for.

And it certainly seems like he needs to. His opponent here, yet again, is Mack Swain, credited to posterity as 'Sporty Ladykiller' which means that he carries a tennis racket and hits on Mabel, even though his own wife is mere yards away on a different Echo Park bench. In fact he rather emphatically hits on Mabel, not remotely taking no for an answer, and with Charlie getting drunk in a nearby bar, there's apparently not a soul to stop him. The comedy arrives when Charlie leaves the bar, notices what's going on and drunkenly attempts to do something about it. Here's the ass kicking scene, because Swain just shrugs him off, using his bulk to keep him away from Mabel. Charlie can't get round him, so resorts to punching, then kicking him in the ass, only to be completely ignored for his troubles. This isn't a bad scene, because it tries to do something a little different from the norm, even if it's otherwise so reminiscent of scenes in a whole host of other Keystone films of the era. It does show a little imagination, at least.

Light drama takes over from comedy for a while, with laughs present but notably milder than usual, even if we factor in Chaplin's continual attempts to ratchet down the more overt slapstick for which Keystone was justly known and introduce more subtle character-infused humour in its place. Eventually though, we find Charlie teaming up with Sporty Ladykiller's wife to rescue Mabel from his clutches. Whether Swain's screen wife is played by Eva Nelson or Alice Howell, it's clear to everyone involved that she's much more capable of dealing with the situation than Charlie the Little Drunk Tramp. This surely resonates in Mabel's mind, so she buys the boxing dummy on display in front of a sporting goods store to stir things up later. While we can't expect the Keystone prop department to throw things out after a single use, this is clearly the very same boxing dummy that audiences saw Roscoe Arbuckle take on only nine days earlier in The Knockout. They could at least have put it in a different turtleneck or perhaps turned down the collar.

Given that Charlie has trouble getting through the bar's swinging door, in yet another recurring Keystone gag, it'll be no surprise to figure out what happens next. Yes, he's drunk as a skunk by the time he gets in and Mabel's already in bed. Perhaps he thought the onions he stole from the bar were a bunch of flowers, but he gets waylaid by the boxing dummy, which... suspend your disbelief here... he mistakes for Sporty Ladykiller, who must surely have followed her home to stand like a sentinel just inside their front door. It's hardly the most surprising set up for a set of gags, not one moment after she bought the dummy coming as anything close to a shock, but Chaplin and Normand were both consummate professionals and they played it all out with the sort of pristine timing required. It's a shame they didn't get a better scene to end the picture, which marked the last time they'd act together in a film carrying the name of Mabel's regular character. Otherwise they had a couple of shorts and a feature together still to come.

It's telling that there's so little to say about Mabel's Married Life. Beyond being made at a crucial point in Chaplin's career, it's notably unworthy of note. Chaplin is capable, but he'd played a drunk so often thus far that we can't fail to realise how routine this was for him. Normand is capable too, but is given next to nothing to do. She'd taken a surprising back seat to Chaplin from the first moment they appeared in film together, but at least she tried to steal her films back early on. By this point, she'd apparently decided it wasn't worth the fight and let him run the show. She plays her few scenes without him well, but not quite so well as to elevate the film. Mack Swain is on lecherous autopilot and his wife is exactly the crotchetty old spouse that might just have him under her thumb, however large he is. The only other character who gets a moment to shine is a supposed friend who torments Charlie in the bar. He's played by Hank Mann, who, years later, would play a far more memorable foil for Chaplin in the boxing ring in City Lights.

Perhaps Mabel's Married Life suffered from the sheer speed at which folk were working in mid-1914. After wrapping Caught in the Rain on 13th April, Chaplin went straight into work on Keystone's comedy feature, Tillie's Punctured Romance, which shot from 14th April to 9th June. He didn't work on a short for a month, then caught up with a vengeance by shooting three pictures in a mere nine days in May: The Fatal Mallet from the 10th to the 12th, then Her Friend the Bandit and The Knockout back to back between the 11th and the 18th. Work began on Mabel's Busy Day on the 17th and continued until the 26th. It looks like he took a breather for a few days and then knocked out Mabel's Married Life between the 30th and 2nd June, a four day shoot. In all, five Chaplin pictures reached cinema screens in under three weeks in June, surely an unimaginable pace to us with a century of hindsight. By comparison, there would only be a single one in July, before another five arrived in August, though spread out at least from the 1st to the 31st.

No wonder this was hardly a stellar period in Chaplin's career. After a few poor early pictures as he found his feet, he settled into a routine of capable comedies that occasionally warranted more attention, like A Film Johnnie, The Star Boarder or Caught in the Rain. However, his previous film, Mabel's Busy Day, was surely the weakest he'd made thus far and this is almost the epitome of an OK movie, probably the most forgettable film he'd made yet. It's notable that this down period corresponds with the presence of studio boss Mack Sennett in the director's chair. However badly Chaplin got on with George Nichols, he did find a way to experiment in the films he directed. Under Sennett, his only experimentation was to appear in drag in A Busy Day, though we don't have Her Friend the Bandit to review. So Mabel's Married Life is only notable as a marker at the end of the first phase of Chaplin's career, in which he was directed by others. As of his next picture, Laughing Gas, he'd begin to have the creative control he had fought so long for.

Important Sources:
David Robinson - Chaplin: His Life and Art (1985)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)

Mabel's Married Life can be watched for free at 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 will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.

Mabel's Busy Day (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin

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 title of this picture refers to Mabel, the regular character played by Keystone star Mabel Normand, but if she was having a busy day, Charlie Chaplin was having a busy month. This was the fourth of his films to reach cinema screens in June 1914 and the month wasn't even half over yet. In fact, it had only been two days since audiences had seen his guest appearance in the Roscoe Arbuckle two reeler, The Knockout, but he was back to torment Mabel in another one reeler. Unfortunately it's a weak film, partly because there's very little in the way of story and next to nothing to elevate it from the other Keystone pictures around it but mostly because of its notably disagreeable tone. It's a particularly mean spirited comedy, if its even worthy of being called a comedy, with Chaplin's usually cheeky and sympathetic shots at authority figures aimed instead at Mabel, in financial straits and trying to eke out a living selling hot dogs. She emphatically plays the sympathy card like her life depends on it but, with Chaplin so mean, she had our sympathy from the outset without trying.

At least he's not playing the Little Tramp this time out, at least I don't think he is, though he's much closer to him than any of the other characters he'd played thus far. His toothbrush moustache remains intact but his outfit is much neater and his outlook on life much more ruthless; he's what Jeffrey Vance ably describes as 'a shabby scoundrel', a fair description of him, given that there are apparently no lows to which he won't stoop. Initially his target is that old Keystone faithful, a policeman, but unlike the usual scenario where we're on his side, we're firmly on the side of the cops in this one. They're merely attempting to stop this shabby scoundrel from jumping a line at a racetrack and sneaking in without paying. His response to being noticed is to get immediately violent, a tone which he keeps for a while, beating up the first truly sympathetic cops I've seen working in a Keystone film. If I'd have been in that line, I'd be knocking him down rather than them, an odd feeling indeed. Maybe it's the Little Tramp dressed up to go out, but I'm seeing him as a different character.

Mabel is far more the sort of character we might expect with hindsight to be in a Chaplin movie, though she does plead outrageously for our feelings rather than let her situation speak to us. She's clearly down on her luck, hawking hot dogs from a tray strung around her neck and her face ably displays how desperately she needs to sell the lot. A few years later we'd have seen a half dozen scrawny kids waiting at home for mom to bring food, but here we just get Mabel. She's already sneaked into the racetrack too, not to watch the races but to sell her wares, and she made it in through a back gate with the deliberate knowledge of the cop who's on duty guarding the thing, yet again highlighting how far the police are staying on the side of Everyman in this picture, even if it's for selfish reasons. He does get a free hot dog as a makeshift ticket price. How's that for rampant corruption in the hierarchy of authority? He doesn't even get a promise of something else later, you know, the sort of thing that they couldn't show in 1914 comedies but could hint at with a wink.

We do feel for Mabel, however much we wish she'd stop overacting. We might find ourselves immune to her charms because we can see how much she's trying, but we feel for her anyway because of how consistently badly everyone treats her. Everyone seems to want something for nothing and they aren't even nice about it. The first potential customer thinks it would be a laugh to stick one of her hot dogs in her nose, just to show off to the pair of ladies he's with. She knocks him down for his troubles and sends him packing. The next few just move her on, as if they're offended by her presence, but then, almost in tears at how badly she's doing and possibly losing her voice to boot, finds some customers. The first initially walks away without paying her, though he does come back to tickle her chin and leave her a coin. The second has a whole wad of cash, but throws his purchase back in her tray when he realises she can't make change. Later in Chaplin's career, we might expect this to be social commentary on class, but here it's just men behaving badly.

Behaving the worst of all, of course, is Chaplin's character. He hones in on a trio of young ladies engrossed in the racing, first walking in front of them, then using one as an armrest and finally opening another's purse in a rather blatant fashion, hauling out what appears to be a wig and using it as a fan. What's most amazing is that, when he's discovered, inevitably because he isn't remotely hiding anything he's doing, he simply turns on the charm and all three of them start grinning like lunatics. I wonder if this is supposed to be just another extension to the mischief Chaplin's characters often get up to, the charm suggesting that it's all in good fun, however mean spirited it might seem. Alternatively, it could be read as Chaplin coming to a realisation that he could do anything on screen and audiences would still laugh, so he was testing his boundaries to see how far he could go without losing us. I don't buy that in the slightest, thinking more that humour was merely far less sophisticated in 1914, but the thought resonates as he was certainly exploring sympathy on screen.

The one kindly act he performs here arrives when an obnoxious customer starts hassling Mabel physically. I say kindly rather than altruistic because he has hidden motives. He isn't doing it to help Mabel, he's doing it to show off to those three ladies; and his next action underlines his morality. Initially he plays it just like any Chaplin character. He saves the girl by preventing a man from stealing one of her hot dogs, taking him down and sending him packing, then consoles her, telling her that it's all right. Here, the unexpected coda is that he then promptly steals one himself and hightails it out of there. Because of the way it's played, how he sets up the contrast, it's the one truly funny moment in the film. Again, I come back to that thought about whether he was manipulating our emotions to see what he could get away with. Just as Catholics believe that sins can be wiped out through confession, does one kindly act in a Chaplin movie cancel out in our minds all the horrible actions he's got away with prior to it? If charm doesn't, maybe kindness does? Perhaps he was finding out.

If that was the extent of it, we might buy into his thinking, but it escalates, as Keystone pictures have a habit of doing. Mabel chases him and elicits the assistance of the cop who let her in, so Charlie does a runner. That makes sense, but here he goes a step beyond, stealing not just another hot dog in the process but her entire tray of them, promptly giving them all away to the first crowd he stops in. Clearly Mabel had pitched her tent in the wrong part of the racetrack, because here she'd have sold out in no time but, by the time she gets the chance, her stock is completely depleted, except for what he's stolen back from the people who stole from him what he stole from her. Are you following? As with the three ladies earlier, the fix to this disconcerting state of affairs is to turn on the charm because that's all that's needed in this picture to make everything OK. It's like Chaplin's working on the level of three year olds with boo boos. Let mommy smile for you and it'll all be better, right? That doesn't quite work with 'a shabby scoundrel' destroying a young lady's livelihood.

Unfortunately what might be the picture's only mitigating factor isn't there for us today. There is a suggestion that the heart of this shabby scoundrel might be touched by Mabel's tears during the finalé, thus leaving us a positive outcome, but this would need an intertitle to back it up and the intertitles are believed lost. If this is the case, they certainly left it late to turn it around, as even Chaplin can't grab our sympathies that quickly. Given all that's gone before, we can't help but see it as another con. So, with that possible saving grace lost to us, at least at the moment, we have to look elsewhere and we don't find much. Perhaps the most notable aspect to the film today is how the crowds, who are generally kept away from the actors, receive their antics. The restored version of Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal shows us how the public first saw Chaplin, but there's a progression to that apparent in some of his later Keystone films shot on location, like this one. The audience are clearly laughing at everything Chaplin's doing in scenes like the one where he gets into the racetrack.

In other Chaplin films, the races themselves might be something of a draw. Even in something as primitive as Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal, there's an interplay with the location as Charlie nearly gets knocked down by a couple of vehicles. Here, there's nothing of the sort. We're at the Ascot Park Speedway in Los Angeles for an exhibition race that ran on 17th May, 1914, but it's only shot by a static camera positioned on a bend, thus capturing little but great clouds of dust hurled towards it as cars chase around that corner as Ascot Park was a dirt track. We never see moving cars in the same shot as people, let alone with Charlie or Mabel. If it wasn't for the reactions of the audience to their antics, this is yet another location shoot that could have been made back at the studio without travel costs. Surprisingly close to the city, apparently it was a popular venue not just for racing but for movie shoots, hosting the original Gone in 60 Seconds, A Very Brady Christmas and a few of the Frankie and Annette movies. Sadly we'd be better off watching them than Mabel's Busy Day.

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

Mabel's Busy Day can be watched for free at 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 will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.

The Knockout (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Roscoe Arbuckle, Minta Durfee, Edgar Kennedy and Charlie Chaplin

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.

Even as a new face on the Keystone lot, Charlie Chaplin was thrown in at the deep end as a leading man. Most of the films he made were Chaplin films, pure and simple, beginning with his first, Making a Living, and especially with his second, Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal. When he made a guest appearance in a another star's picture, such as Mabel's Strange Predicament, the first of various Mabel Normand films in which he appeared, it generally turned into a Chaplin film anyway by sheer force of his performance. We rarely think of him being a minor cast member, whether in a cameo role or really filling a supporting role as a guest, mostly because it rarely happened but perhaps also because the best example is the one we didn't have until recently. Chaplin's brief performance as a Keystone Kop in A Thief Catcher was, for the longest time, regarded as a faulty memory on his part until the picture was rediscovered in 2009. Until then, The Knockout, clearly a Roscoe Arbuckle vehicle, was the best example we had.

It's Arbuckle we see immediately and who dominates the film throughout, whether that be as the large presence on screen during the first reel or as what can only be described as the force of nature blitzing through the second. Chaplin doesn't show up until that second reel, officiating (if that term can remotely be applied here) over a boxing match between Arbuckle and Edgar Kennedy. Until then a relatively slow and not particularly interesting Keystone picture, this is when it speeds up substantially and grabs our attention, Chaplin's contributions surely being a large part of that. Initially I felt like the two thoroughly different reels played like two thoroughly different, albeit linked, films, as their tones couldn't be more out of whack. However, with more thought, I realise that the boxing match plays like a finalé, wrapping up a consistent story arc before The Knockout descends into the chaos for which Keystone were rightly known, with the resulting chase marking the real departure, somewhat like a tacked on extra.

Ironically, it's the entire second reel, the boxing match finalé and the insanity fuelled chase scene that follows it that resonates today. I couldn't help but be reminded of the famous ending of Blazing Saddles, in which a sprawling fight scene in an admittedly already unconventional western bursts, quite literally, through the walls of the studio in which it's being shot and, in so doing, transforms the film entirely. This doesn't quite go that far, though there is a neat scene earlier in which Arbuckle ventures into this sort of territory, having the cameraman temporarily point the camera away from him while he gets changed for his fight. Even if it doesn't escape the confines of the film, this chase scene, as sprawling as the brawl scene in Blazing Saddles, does veer away from its story arc and spills over into others, which are never explained, such as a fancy party in a mansion. While this mansion could just be an unrelated building in town, it could easily have been seen as another movie set if they'd broken only one more rule.

Who was responsible for The Knockout is surprisingly unclear to us today. Historically it's been seen as a Mack Sennett picture, whether he's listed as the film's director or after a more vague credit like 'made under the supervision of'. More recently, Charles Avery's name has been associated with The Knockout as its director, by as reliable a source as the British Film Institute though for as unreliable a reason as an unsupported claim at Wikipedia that Avery directed 35 of Arbuckle's pictures at Keystone. Similarly, who wrote the film is open to debate. Some sources say that Chaplin was responsible for the story, though it doesn't ring true. It's far too wild and inconsistent, not to mention traditional for Keystone, to be entirely his, though anyone watching the scene he's in can't fail to recognise that he must have contributed in a major way to that part. Jeffrey Vance highlights that it 'borrows from bits in Karno sketches', namely The Yap Yaps and Mumming Birds, the latter of which Chaplin performed and the former of which he knew.

And so we're left with what's on screen, which is quite a bit in a long two reeler that runs thirty minutes, the longest film Chaplin had been in thus far except for the feature, Tillie's Punctured Romance, which wouldn't be finished for another six months. Most of the enjoyment comes from the second frantic reel, because the first is slow and poor. Arbuckle plays a character named Pug rather than Fatty, surely a hint at the pugilism he'll soon be getting up to, but for now he just eats a burger with his dog and flirts with his girlfriend, played by his real life wife, Minta Durfee. Incidentally, keeping it further in the family, his nephew, Al St John, reportedly plays three bit parts in the film too. One of them starts the action, as the leader of a gang that hones in on Pug's girl, who was therefore really his aunt. After Pug leaves to get more cigarettes, his attentions escalate in his absence and turn into a full fledged fight after his return, with Pug proving victorious over a gang of four, even with bricks flying every which way.

His success against such odds is how he connects to the main plot, which revolves around a pair of new conmen in town setting up a fake boxing match. Spying a theatre with a Caught in a Cabaret poster on display, they talk the owner into letting Cyclone Flynn take on all comers and Pug soon becomes the first of them. Pug's size leads to complications, but it's the arrival of the real Cyclone Flynn which really stirs it up. Arbuckle looks laughable in his short tank top, shorts, tights and girly belt, more like a poorly dressed drag queen than a boxer. Flynn, however is played by Edgar Kennedy, who had serious experience in the ring, to which he gravitated after school. In his obituary, The St Petersburg Times reported that he'd once gone twelve rounds with Jack Dempsey, losing by decision rather than knockout. Only a single picture for Selig separates his boxing career from his much longer career in film comedy, which began at Keystone Studios with a 1912 picture called Hoffmeyer's Legacy, in which he played a Keystone Kop.

He certainly looks completely at home in the ring, unlike Arbuckle and especially Chaplin, who breezes onto our screen just before the twenty minute mark to officiate in a suitably inept fashion. He retains his toothbrush moustache but otherwise doesn't seem to be an incarnation of the Little Tramp, being neatly dressed in regular sized clothes. In reality Chaplin knew the ring well, not as a boxer but as a regular at prizefights in Los Angeles. He'd play a fighter in future films but here restricts himself to fighting in a set of highly inappropriate ways, both taking and giving as many punches (and kicks) as he would if he was supposed to. Even guest referees in WWE title bouts don't get caught up in quite this much action! The choreography is clever, because it's clearly dangerous to walk in between two fighters, however careful you're doing so, but Keystone was always strong on choreography. It was less strong on cinematography and there were odd decisions made here on that front that aren't all easily explainable.

I can understand shooting the audience separately to the ring, because they were using a fixed camera. It's easy to shoot the two angles separately and edit them together later, even linking them through our perception by having Pug's mouthful of milk spray the guy in the front seat of the audience. I'm less on board with why they chose to shoot the ring from such a bizarre angle. We're not close to it, for a start, but we're also far enough off to the side that it's condensed into must be about only half of the screen's available real estate. The only reason I can see for this choice is so that we can also watch Mack Swain's western style gambler sitting in his box to the left of the ring. He's only just been brought into the story but he has a crucial part to play in it. Quite why he couldn't have stayed off screen throughout the fight until the moment he's needed, I have no idea. The Knockout followed that precise approach elsewhere, as a Keystone Kop walks on screen only to be hit by a flying brick and knocked into a horse trough.

In the absence of nuanced decisions in these matters, it falls, as always, to Chaplin to throw in many of the little touches that light up the second half of the film. At one point, the ring becomes soaked, maybe to wake him up from one of his periodic knockouts (only the referee gets knocked out in this picture), so he hauls himself along on his backside using the bottom rope. Another instance has him look up to the roof and pray for God's aid in dealing with these two monsters. Compared to what Chaplin gets up to in the ring, the ensuing chase across the rooftops is merely blatant, fuelled by a pair of pistols somehow easily holdable and fireable by a man wearing boxing gloves. Needless to say, its almost endless supply of bullets is almost glossed over. This is a great chase sequence just for Arbuckle and Kennedy, who is reminiscent at points of a swashbuckling hero, but the Keystone Kops inevitably join in and make it still more fun. It's thoroughly enjoyable, just not for its subtlety. It wins out through sheer exuberance.

At this point, it's almost unbelievable that the second reel follows the first. Where that was slow and plot driven, for the most part, this is mile a minute Keystone insanity. It's also where the real ingenuity comes into play, not only through Chaplin's brief segment. Arbuckle, never a small and insignificant flower, is a force of nature here, a behemoth who successfully takes on half a dozen Keystone Kops at once, not in a fight but in a bizarre tug of war. One manages to lasso him, but he carries on regardless. And on and on, hauling them, dragging them and swinging them around as if the laws of physics don't apply to him. The subtletly in this film may belong to Chaplin, but the film itself belongs to Arbuckle, whose relentlessness and boundless energy are as infectious as they are humorous. By the time it was over, I felt like I could challenge Cyclone Flynn myself, after I stopped for a breather of course. There's a full half hour of chaos in The Knockout; however, it's merely compressed into the last fifteen minutes.

Important Sources:
Gerald McDonald, Michael Conway & Mark Ricci - The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin (1988)
Jeffrey Vance - Chaplin: Genius of the Cinema (2003)
Edgar Kennedy, Film Actor, Dies, The St Petersburg Times, 10 Nov 1948

The Knockout can be watched for free at 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 will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.

Her Friend the Bandit (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand and Charles Murray

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.

As I work through each of Charlie Chaplin's films from his debut year of 1914, this will be the shortest of the reviews I'll post, for one very good reason: Her Friend the Bandit is considered a lost film. Now, we can all cross our fingers and hope that maybe one day it'll show up somewhere. After all, A Thief Catcher was rediscovered in 2009 at an antiques show in Michigan, and that wasn't just considered lost, it was also considered to have never even existed, a mythical beast referenced only in a memory of Chaplin's that he had once played a Keystone Kop. In reality, it had over time become conflated with this picture, which was later reissued under the title of The Thief Catcher. Flicker Alley have already made half of A Thief Catcher available to the public in their Chaplin at Keystone box set and the whole film is due for a July release by the same company in The Mack Sennett Collection, Vol 1. So, who knows if some film fan will one day turn up a copy of the last remaining lost Chaplin movie, Her Friend the Bandit. Here's to hoping.

Without being able to see the film today, we're stuck looking at contemporary reviews, which I've found to be rarely particularly helpful. For a start, tastes were wildly different, leading to reviews like the one in The Cinema that said about Chaplin's threadbare second picture, 'Kid Auto Races struck us as about the funniest film we have ever seen.' Sometimes, however, it almost feels like reviewers saw utterly different films. For instance, the Syracuse Post-Standard review of His Favorite Pastime, as quoted in The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin, focused on the final scene in which Charlie is stuck at the top of a telegraph pole lowering a chunk of limburger cheese to drive off his enemy who's below with an axe. No known print of the film contains this scene and it wouldn't seem to remotely fit with the rest of it. Perhaps it was tacked on from another source for a reissue. More likely, the reviewer just confused it with another picture, 'Charlie's India rubber countenance' sounding far more like Buster Keaton than the Chaplin of 1914.

The synopses we have suggest that Charlie shrugs off the costume of the Little Tramp once more, which he did for a number of films in 1914. This time it's so that he can play a bandit, perhaps an elegant one, as some accounts have it. He's already had a flirtation with Mabel, naturally played by Mabel Normand, so could be forgiven for attending a party at her house. However he attends it while masquerading as a French nobleman, Count de Beans, and his inability to mimic the etiquette required to prove that he's a member of high society brings him down. In other words, his continual and presumably highly comedic faux pas shock the guests until the Keystone Kops are called and we finish up in the usual chase scene. This sounds like an interesting new approach for a Chaplin picture, while never straying too far from the usual mechanics required for Keystone slapstick. That Chaplin wrote the picture himself promises much, but it was also directed by Mack Sennett, so may have inevitably remained closer to the routine.

Most of the cast are unverified, but confirmed in support to Chaplin and Normand as the real Count de Beans is Charles Murray. Older than Chaplin by seventeen years, he only debuted on screen in 1912, a couple of years before his rival here, but he had churned out over eighty films before this one and had also established a regular character, Skelley, at Biograph. This was his first picture with Chaplin, though he would be back for Mabel's Married Life, The Masquerader, His New Profession and, like everyone else at Keystone, the feature length Tillie's Punctured Romance. Normand, of course, was a Keystone regular who had appeared in many Chaplin films, as he had also appeared in many of hers. Having so recently brought a little feminine charm to The Fatal Mallet, this would seem to be a great opportunity for her to play an elegant hostess, Mrs de Rocks. Sadly we may never know, because at this time, as far as we're aware, nobody has yet turned up a print of this picture. Check your attics, folks!

Important Sources:
Gerald McDonald, Michael Conway & Mark Ricci - The Complete Films of Charlie Chaplin (1988)

Because this film is considered lost, it's not available online (or anywhere else, for that matter) to view. Anything you see online under this title is erroneous. For instance, this one and this one are really Chaplin's 1916 Essanay two reeler, Police, while these fragments aren't even from a Chaplin movie, they're from Chaplin imitator Billy West's film His Day Out.

The Fatal Mallet (1914)

Director: Mack Sennett
Stars: Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Mack Swain and Mabel Normand

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.

To suggest that Keystone Studios made Charlie Chaplin a busy man during his year there in 1914 is quite an outrageous understatement. They released five Chaplin pictures in February alone, four more in each of March and April and, eventually, the staggering total of 36 for the year. Yet, the first screenings of The Fatal Mallet on Monday, 1st June marked the end of a 25 day drought since the release of A Busy Day. At this point, the wait between Chaplin pictures had never exceeded 14 days, but studio head Mack Sennett had decided that the time was right to make a feature, the first American feature length comedy, Tillie's Punctured Romance. Shooting began on 14th April, the day after Chaplin wrapped Caught in the Rain, his solo directorial debut, and continued until 9th June. Chaplin worked on nothing else for a month, but then made rapid amends for his lack of new material on theatre screens by turning out four short films in just over two weeks. The Fatal Mallet was the first of them.

The strange thing is that it's far more notable as a Sennett picture than as a Chaplin picture. Not only did Sennett produce and direct the film, he also starred in it and as a lead actor too, functioning as the other half of a double act with Chaplin for most of it. In so doing, he kept more screen time for himself than he had done before and I can't help but wonder why. His substantial contributions to the art and science of American screen comedy cannot be overstated, but that wasn't because of his talents as an actor; even his biggest admirers would admit that he was one of the weaker actors on the Keystone set. It could just be that Harry McCoy was sick but, perhaps, after considering feedback from each of Chaplin's directors, all of whom had struggled with him, Sennett wanted to experience it first hand for a few pictures before allowing his star loose to consistently direct himself. Certainly, he was done giving him to others; from A Busy Day until his last day at Keystone, Chaplin only had to take direction from Sennett or himself.

Whatever the reason for Sennett's prominence on screen, his contributions can't be ignored and certain decisions ring down the years with the power of hindsight. Initially he's Chaplin's rival for the attentions of Mabel Normand, but with the arrival of a third suitor, played by Mack Swain, the two team up to take down the bigger man. Normand was a lovely young lady, who was one of Keystone's biggest draws long before Chaplin was hired and would remain so after he had left the studio, but she's remembered more today for her relationship with her boss than for her actual acting. Mack and Mabel were a couple, but it was never an easy ride and his inability to put a ring on her finger is surely why Sennett never married. For his part, Chaplin tried but failed to start a romance. 'We remained, unfortunately, only good friends,' he wrote in his autobiography. He admits a mutual kiss but sadly reports that attempts to build upon it failed: ''No, Charlie,' she said good-humouredly, 'I'm not your type, neither are you mine.''

Most of my reviews of Chaplin's Keystone films thus far have highlighted how he was bringing change to their comedic style, introducing subtleties and emotions that he knew well from the vaudeville stage to a studio that was, admittedly successfully, doing what it had always done with no will to do otherwise. Thus it can't come as much of a surprise to find that The Fatal Mallet, as near as any Keystone film ever was a creation of Mack Sennett alone, is what Jeffrey Vance called, 'One of the crudest of the Chaplin-Keystone comedies,' though he did add that, 'it nevertheless fascinates for the extended comic interplay between Chaplin and Sennett.' The underlying concept is simple: everyone wants in Mabel's pants. There are only five characters on screen: Mabel, three suitors and a young boy who wants Mabel as well, if perhaps in a different way. Only one can win out, so the title card could easily have read, 'Let battle commence!' That it does, with almost the entire running time built from kicks, shoves, thrown bricks and swung mallets.

Initially Sennett appears like a junior version of Chaplin. He's another tramp, as evidenced by the string holding up his trousers. He has a similar hat and a similar jacket, later seen buttoned in a similar way to Chaplin's, with a lone button straining to keep the garment closed. However, where Chaplin is crisp and assured in his movements, Sennett is not; they're generally slow and overdone. Given that he obviously kept laughing throughout the entire three day shoot, the constant half smile on his face makes him look idiotic, what Yorkshiremen would call 'gormless'. As the picture moves on, he seems more and more like Tweedledee or Tweedledum; maybe we could call him Tweedledumber. He has Mabel's attentions at the outset, to give a great example, but it doesn't take much for Chaplin to woo her away from him. He just pulls the old 'look over there' trick. Sennett's response, once he's caught up with what just happened to him, is just as old: he kicks Chaplin in the ass and runs away.

What follows is exactly what you might expect, bereft of pretty much anything in the way of subtlety, in fact just the least subtle parts of Caught in a Cabaret expanded out to be the entire picture. The bricks thrown during the finalé of that film are thrown during the majority of this one, and the large mallet that Chaplin uses to knock out Mack Swain there may just be the very same mallet he uses to knock him out again here. Keystone was all about reusing gags that worked; if one got an audience to laugh, it would surely do the same thing in the next twenty pictures it got hauled out for. Here Sennett throws the first brick at Chaplin, but it merely starts a brick throwing war between the two rivals, growing in intensity as Swain arrives on the scene and Mabel escapes her twin suitors to preen for a third. By this point, they've descended to what can only be described as animalistic territory protection, Chaplin hopping at Sennett in a threatening manner that involves an outrageous pelvic thrust to emphasise his intentions.

Why this film was called The Fatal Mallet I have no idea, because nobody dies in this movie, whether by mallet or any other instrument. It was originally shot as The Knockout, but perhaps got changed when it became clear that the title would work better for the Roscoe Arbuckle boxing short which began filming the day before this one wrapped, with Chaplin making a guest appearance as a referee. Beyond making more sense there anyway, that was also a two reel picture so surely took priority over this one reeler. If we factor in how incredibly empty this one is, it must have felt like a no brainer. If Chaplin had crammed into the one reel of Caught in the Rain enough material to fill three, here Sennett really only had enough to make a split reel feel weak. I actually prefer one of the reissue titles, because Hit Him Again sums up the picture magnificently, certainly more emphatically than The Rival Suitors, which is accurate but far too genteel, or The Pile Driver, another title that makes no sense whatsoever.

Chaplin does make an effort, but there's so little framework here that it's clearly a struggle, especially if we factor in who he's stuck working with. Working a double act with Sennett would have held everyone back. What the Little Tramp does manage to achieve is obvious in any scene featuring the pair of them, none of which could fail to stand witness as a comparison in Chaplin's clear favour. With Swain stuck in the same brick throwing rut as everyone else, he doesn't get much of a chance to elevate things, which leaves Mabel Normand, the focal point of The Fatal Mallet, with the best opportunity. She does far better than I'm used to seeing her do in these Chaplin pictures, taking bricks and kicks better than her boss for a start but also smiling agreeably and adding some charm to proceedings. Chaplin wrote of 'full lips that curled delicately at the corners of her mouth, expressing humour and all sorts of indulgence.' Stuck in a role that could easily be described as the MacGuffin, those attributes are very much on show.

And really, at the end of the day, it's Normand who walks away from this one. Given that the entire film takes place in a park, anyone who's been paying attention to my previous Chaplin at Keystone reviews will know precisely where the majority of the characters will end up and precisely how it will happen as well. Yet Mabel, for all that she's spent the picture being clobbered in almost every way, from accidental fists to unearned kicks via a careless run in with a swing and never forgetting those wayward bricks, she isn't among those left floundering in the lake, instead walking away arm in arm with her boss, lover and co-star, Mack Sennett. I couldn't help but remember Howard Hughes, secluded away in his later years, screening The Conqueror over and over, so conquering again and again his former lover Susan Hayward. The Fatal Mallet has a dream ending for Sennett, clearly getting the girl he cared about most but wasn't able to wed. He outlived her by thirty years and I wonder how often he screened this to remember.

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

The Fatal Mallet can be watched for free at 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 will debut in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1 in July.

Derby (2013)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Corey Busboom and Travis Mills

In 2013, Travis Mills and Running Wild Films set themselves a serious challenge: to produce 52 films in 52 weeks, all contemporary adaptations from stories in the public domain. They met the challenge and in so doing highlighted to the Arizona film community that pretty much anything is possible. What shocked me at the three day festival in February when they screened all these films to the public was that, even given such outrageous restrictions in timeframe, none of these films sucked. Of course, some were clearly a lot better than others, but the quality range ran from excellent down to blah rather than excellent all the way down to sucky. So, because Mills proved two important points with his project and because this highlights how with one review to kick off each month, I'm never going to catch up with his prolific output, I'm going to launch a project of my own: 52 Films/52 Weeks/52 Reviews. Starting in July, I'll be reviewing one of the 52 Films/52 Weeks pictures each week for a year. I still won't catch up, but at least I'll have another book.

When I firmed up the project, I realised that there would be two new months before my chosen start date. Given that I've been embarrassing Mills lately with older movies that he'd forgotten he'd even made, I felt I should ask him which Running Wild titles that I hadn't yet reviewed would be his choice for me to cover. He suggested Foster, You're Dead, which I reviewed last month, and Derby, which I'm reviewing now. Both are certainly interesting short films, but I don't find myself particularly enthusiastic about either of them. Foster, You're Dead was exactly the sort of film that an ambitious local production company like Running Wild should make: a public domain science fiction story by a major author which is just as timely in 2013 as when it was written in 1955 and which has no need for a special effects budget. I found it well written but less well put together, surprisingly lacking on the passion front. Derby is far more passionate, but it's an odd documentary because it doesn't document quite what we think it should.

Rather than documenting the wild and wacky, yet quintessentially American, world of demolition derby, it focuses far more on a brief journey into this world by the Running Wild team as a publicity stunt, as Mills drives his #52 wreck onto the Buckeye dirt track with a camera mounted inside the vehicle and 'Running Wild' prominently painted on the side. That this is less about the demolition derby itself and more about the moment in time when Mills ventured into one is obvious from a quick breakdown of the running time. The film runs fourteen minutes but, while the halfway mark does find the car at the track, it's still firmly daytime. Night doesn't fall until the eight minute mark, while the guys are still fitting the in-car camera. We don't see the car move until well over two thirds of the way through and the chaos kicks in after ten minutes. Even then, we're not going to gain any real insight into how a demolition derby works and how drivers might strategise. Then again, the rules do seem outstandingly simple.

Having only experienced demolition derby through old computer games like Carmageddon, I did learn a lot here, though not all of it actually had to do with the action. Most obviously, you clearly don't have to know anything about demolition derby to drive demolition derby; just do what everyone else is doing. If you can't move, kill the engine, and always pad the driver's door, just in case. Rules say that nobody is allowed to hit that and it's painted a different colour to be completely obvious, but hey, it's a dangerous pastime. Don't drive like a puss, as Corey Busboom, the driving force behind this picture, points out. 'Be aggressive!' Mostly it's quirky lessons that leapt out though. Sledgehammers are useful detailing tools. Leaning into a running engine when you have long dreadlocks is completely safe. Men can mangle The Star Spangled Banner just as outrageously as women. Travis Mills clearly can't spell 'demolition' to save his life. And, ultimately, nobody really cares who wins at a demolition derby; just destroy things.

I also learned how down and dirty derby really is. If I'm understanding the structure of the film, the initial preparation of the #52 began on the morning of the event. That means that Busboom and his associates, Willy, Jason and Dirty Steve, got this thing up and running, welded, painted, made as safe as possible, in about half a day. That's pretty impressive work, perhaps a mechanic equivalent of the 52 Films/52 Weeks project. There isn't enough running time to give us too much of an impression of these characters, but it's a sure bet that they're all characters. Busboom is the most obvious, far more than Mills himself who gets to drive around with the in-car camera on him, generating glorious colours and reflections. Busboom is overdue for his own documentary, being not only a regular demolition derby driver but an avant-garde artist too, the creator of bizarre musical instruments (Mark Mothersbaugh of Devo is a particularly notable fan) and a devotee of body suspension who matches hooks to years for birthday celebrations.

We see a lot less of Mills, or indeed anyone else, including the #52 car, which we might expect would be the lead character all on its own. I did particularly enjoy the 'How's my driving?' banner above where the windscreen would be, if such things weren't removed for demolition derby. I wonder if, had the film been less concerned with capturing a particular day and more with the sport itself, all these characters would have stood out more. Clearly they're worthy of attention, but mostly they just get a maybe unintentional nod with the inclusion of Friends in Low Places in the background at one point. A tighter focus on derby itself would have called for more actual footage of the event and longer, more expansive shots that give us an idea of what the drivers are doing. The action is shot very close here, more like a set of snapshots of what the #52 did on its holiday. Of course, there's the expected strong editing and music, this time by Less Pain Forever, so it's a capable piece but I found that I wanted a different documentary.

Derby can be watched for free on Vimeo.