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.

Duel at the Mound (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Michael Hanelin, Jonathan Medina, Holly Nordquist, Michelle Palermo, Eric Almassy, Stacie Stocker, Kyle Gerkin, Amy Searcy, Colleen Hartnett, Shellie Ulrich, James Leatherman, Kristi Lawrence, Gus Edwards, Keylor Leigh and John Miller

With an enviable number of short films, not to mention three features behind them, it's hardly surprising to find that Running Wild's fourth feature, Duel at the Mound, boasts a highly recognisable cast. There are fifteen names given special attention during the end credits and fourteen of them are regular faces, led by Michael Hanelin and Jonathan Medina as the two former semi-pro baseball players whose duel of the title helps keep them sane in lives otherwise full of pain and heartbreak. Hanelin is Walt and Medina is Mel and the two lead otherwise separate lives, never once meeting up for a beer or to just reminisce on old times. Perhaps that's because baseball may have given them everything, but it also took it all away again. Walt lost his family to the game, the film opening with his divorce and continuing with his struggle to keep his daughter close. We're never told why Mel quit, but it's surely something similar and he soon loses a girlfriend to the ongoing duel. She thinks he's cheating on her, but he's just facing down Walt.

Bizarrely, even though they don't talk to each other, Walt and Mel are each other's closest friends, which realisation explains much. 'I don't have any friends,' Walt tells his therapist. Well, except an 'old baseball acquaintance'. They communicate through baseballs, which they leave at each other's houses with dates and places written on them, and they connect through baseball, silently playing out their duel. While I'm English and thus don't understand baseball in the slightest, their pain is universal. It's troubling to watch people clearly driven by the one thing they're trying desperately to stop being part of their lives. Medina has the edge because Mel is notably less in control. He's completely driven by an all-consuming passion that he's failing to quench; he suffers when not playing and the game just won't let him be. Walt is able to suppress it better but it's still there. It's notable how close this pair are without knowing a thing about each other; their first real interaction is particularly telling for a number of reasons.

The fifteenth name in the credits belongs to Holly Nordquist, who plays Walt's daughter, Chloe, and does a respectable job of doing so in what is the most substantial role behind the leads. She's not completely new to Running Wild, having appeared in a 52 Films in 52 Weeks short, James Joyce's After the Race, and she establishes herself well here, sparring capably with Michael Hanelin, but she's not one of the quickly recognisable faces that populate the rest of the supporting cast. For instance, Walt's ex is Stacie Stocker and his therapist is Amy Searcy. The romantic connection Walt almost finds is with Colleen Hartnett and, of course, they don't quite connect as the moment Hanelin and Hartnett find a screen relationship that might actually work, the apocalypse will surely be upon us. The girlfriend Mel loses is Shellie Ulrich and, after a date with Kristi Lawrence, he finds Michelle Palermo. He works for Eric Almassy and he encounters a drunken Kyle Gerkin in a bar. Elsewhere, we find John Miller, James Leatherman and Michael Coleman.

These actors are here because they're quintessentially reliable. They're all immediately notable in their supporting slots and they're all capable in their roles, but few have substantial parts. While Stocker has the most emotional scenes, it's Almassy who makes the most of his role. Mel has become a high school teacher and though he's apparently good at it, it isn't what drives him and so he starts to let his life get to his performance. Almassy could easily fire him, but he googled his new employee and discovered his previous life, so everything he says has two layers: the spoken and the unspoken, which is flavoured by the school team that's in sore need of someone who knows what he's doing. He's the best of the bunch here, but the most obvious is Kyle Gerkin, partly because he has a decent amount of screen time late in the movie but mostly because he spends much of it drunk, including a memorable scene where he gets to drunkenly substitute for Walt in the duel. He's just a baseball fan; he doesn't understand.

I've both been looking forward and not looking forward to Duel in the Mound. I'm a fan of many of these actors and relish the opportunity to see them in a feature, but I'm not a fan either of baseball or movies that revolve around sports, something that's shaping a future Apocalypse Later book. I have a great deal of background with Running Wild Films, of course, as I've spent two years opening up each month with a review of one of their shorts; I'm now working through their 52 Films in 52 Weeks in 52 weeks of my own. I've reviewed each of their previous features and have been eagerly waiting the great one which I know will come from them but has been stubbornly refusing to show up thus far. I've long preferred their zero budget debut, The Big Something, to the more ambitious features that followed it, The Detective's Lover and The Men Who Robbed the Bank. I think I prefer it to this too, for its quirky humour and its astounding soundtrack, but there's no disputing that this is the best of the four, in front of and behind the camera.

The biggest flaw early on is probably rooted in the editing, as each scene feels crafted more like a short film than part of a feature. They're all complete vignettes in themselves, pieced together with care, and they might benefit from being looser and flowing less deliberately. However, they all benefit from strong cinematography and sense of place, underpinned by a good score and they still draw us in. Also notable in the early scenes is the fact that almost everything is negative, perhaps inevitably given how the story has to grow with depressed characters coming out of bad situations and struggling to find a way to turn them into good ones. It's the montage scene of Walt and Mel on the pitch that temporarily lifts us up out of their depression as much as them and tells us that there is indeed some positive in the picture. It may sound odd from me, but perhaps there should have been another of these early on to temper how down these two have become. It takes a while for the negative to bleed into positive and characters to engage.

The film engages more as it moves on, of course, and we learn more about these two characters. Hanelin is the more obvious for a while, as he's working hard on finding a life after baseball. He's working through the exams he needs for a career in medicine, working on his relationship with his daughter (who doesn't seem to be returning the sentiment) and working in therapy to figure out how to make it all, well, work. It might sound like we ought to be behind his admirable effort, but he's a hard man to like because he's so relentlessly lonely. 'I'm just not looking right now,' he tells a fellow student who clearly wants him. There's a superbly shot scene where he walks past her without acknowledgement, right through the hospital car park to be on the mound in the rain. While his story arc is one well worth following, he does get a little bit of a get out of jail free card at the end, because his subplot turns into a longer version of Shine Like Gold. I wonder if he would have made it out without that, down the tougher road that he was following.

Gradually, Hanelin gives up the floor to Medina, who is initially less interesting. For a while, he's the other guy in the duel and little more, his background less explored and his motivations less understood. There's worthy material in the school scenes but the effort he's making is all internal, not as quantifiable as what Walt is doing. Yet Medina, always so fantastic at being moody, brings real danger to the picture when his personal struggle starts to really falter. In a way, he gets a get out of jail free card too, but, unlike Walt's, it wasn't there all along waiting to be found and it isn't as easy for him to accept. Walt's story is over and done with by the time the end credits roll, but Mel's isn't. He might have a way out but he still has to take it and it's still not going to be an easy task for him. I should add that this aids the film to no small degree because it ends on a high note. We leave not only with Medina's thunderstorm of a performance but with the sun finally starting to shine through between the clouds. He absolutely rocks the end of this picture.

Of course, while it belongs to Medina, a lot of people rocked the end of this picture, not least because I'm utterly unaffacted by the national sport of the United States yet thoroughly enjoyed this part of the movie which revolves around it. Sure, the rendition of the national anthem backed by stock footage is overdoing the sentiment to no small degree, but all four characters playing the film out are on fire at this point and Travis Mills, who wrote and directed Duel on the Mound, gifts them with really good material to work with. The trio of short baseball films which Mills adapted from stories by Ring Lardner for 52 Films in 52 Weeks are some of my favourites in that project, not least because they're less about baseball and more about passion. This is no different, baseball being something of a MacGuffin because the film is really all about people struggling with their passion and how to let it co-exist amidst the rest of their lives. At a mere 68 minutes, this could have been a lot more, but it bodes well for Durant's Never Closes, coming soon.

Duel at the Mound has two nights left on the big screen at Pollack Tempe Cinemas this Friday and Saturday (7th and 8th November, 2014) at 9.30pm.

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.

Exit to Hell (2013)

Director: Robert Conway
Stars: Kane Hodder, Tiffany Shepis, Rena Riffel, Dustin James, Owen Conway, Taryn Maxximillian Dafoe, Jason Spisak and Dan Higgins

I first saw Exit to Hell under the title of Sickle and I'm in two minds as to the change. Sure, Sickle makes it sound like a routine slasher movie, when there is a little bit more going on here, but Exit to Hell is more of a spoiler than a clarification. If the title is going to bring it that far out into the open, then I presume I can safely highlight that when folk turn off old 69 in Arizona and find themselves in the professionally isolated backwoods town of Red Stone, they're not quite entering the realm of the usual cannibal hick murderers; this place is a little more on the supernatural side. In Sickle, we're supposed to gradually realise that only bad people manage to lose the main road and take the same mysterious turn that none seem to notice, then wonder about what that really means. If it isn't literally Red Stone, a suggestive name to begin with, are they in Hell, Purgatory or just some cursed zone that feeds on dark souls? In a film called Exit to Hell, of course, it's frickin' obvious, even if none of them die until they get there. I liked the ambiguity more.

There's not a heck of a lot of ambiguity anywhere else in the film, because writer/director Robert Conway knows exactly what he wants to throw on the screen and he can't be accused of false advertising. This is neo-grindhouse pulp, painted in that modern style that grindhouse never really was but we imagine that we remember. Of course, the music is newer and heavier and the editing, especially during the opening credits sequence, is MTV ADD. After that, the artificial aging is predominantly restricted to wild transition effects; there are a lot of them throughout but they're not omnipresent. Instead we're given reminders of that seventies vibe in changes to the colour saturation levels and noticeable rear projection, not bad per se but deliberately noticeable. Most of all, the subject matter continually plays out in the neo-grindhouse style, full of drugs, gore and freakiness. It's not as stylised as Rodriguez, as cool as Tarantino or as nasty as Zombie, but it plays well to its budget. This is the sort of VHS you'd have gladly rented in 1985.

Perhaps my memory is playing up, but watching Exit to Hell on Netflix, I found it slightly different to what I remembered of Sickle, which screened with a Q&A at Phoenix Comicon last year. I remembered the odd footage from Conway's gore short, Necro Wars, that kicks in before the movie proper as a wild extension to the various production company idents, but I didn't remember there being quite so much of it. All told, we surely see most of that ten minute short dotted throughout the movie, which isn't good given that the running time is a brief 81 minutes. Knock out Necro Wars and the credits and the picture proper clocks in around the 70 minute mark, hardly a substantial piece. The thing is that I remember more of it from when it was called Sickle, with certain key scenes feeling a little less substantial here and the pace a little more pepped up. Didn't Sheriff Sickle get to use the enhancements on his police car bonnet or was I dreaming at the end of a long Comicon day? Certainly this could easily benefit from more flesh on its bones.

The good news is that the lack of real substance is the biggest flaw of the movie. Conway nails the style he wanted far better and more consistently than various other local filmmakers working with similarly low budgets. The most obvious comparisons are to Brian Skiba's more prominent recent neo-grindhouse films which share many of the same cast, such as Blood Moon Rising and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge. There's more going on in the former and more big names in the latter, but Exit to Hell plays out better than either of them, because it's consistent to itself and Conway hides the budget better. He achieves that by finding a strong location, killing off his characters liberally and stripping away the fat. Yes, he needed more meat on his bones, but at least he got rid of the fat. Those two Skiba films may well be more substantial meals than Conway's, but their fat content is enough to choke a whole bundle of arteries. This one doesn't have any room for distractions.

The story is pretty simple. A gang of thieves are robbing strip clubs and their latest target is Baby Dolls in Phoenix. Well, that's what the sign says, even if the DJ calls it the Pink Pussy. Their approach is to infiltrate a place and then wait for their moment to strike. Here, they've become Travis the DJ, Tasha the bartender, Jenna the stripper and Randy the customer, and their moment arrives in notably bloody fashion as Randy has a temper and the place promptly turns into a bloodbath, what the news dubs the Silicone Slaughter. Off they drive through the night to the border, but Randy lands them in Red Stone instead. We know what happens in Red Stone, because we've already followed a couple of opportunistic killers there in the form of a bug eyed Jose Rosete and a coked up Shane Dean. Cheno and Pablo really aren't bright but holding up Mordin's gas station just as Sheriff Sickle walks in turns out to be a particularly dumb move. The cop demonstrates why his name is appropriate and we're down a couple of talented local names.

Fortunately there are more to come. The leader of the thieves is Dustin Leighton, who I last saw in a short film, Kerry and Angie, but was also the lead in Conway's debut feature, Redemption: A Mile from Hell. The most prominent of the thieves turns out to be Jenna, played by scream queen Tiffany Shepis, who doesn't scream much here because she's clearly too strong to be a stereotypical victim, even while being chased down by Sheriff Sickle. Boris, who ran the strip club, is Michael Harrelson delivering a pretty good Russian accent. Even better is Jason Spisak as his boss, Yakov, a ruthless Russian crime lord who chases down the thieves and naturally ends up in Red Stone too. Spisak has appeared in a number of Arizona horror flicks, from Piranha to Locker 13, but he's far better known as a voice actor, probably why I first experienced his work as a narrator in Avé Maria. Shane Stevens gives a good showing in the coda and the late Noah Todd philosophises well while feeding his snake. As he died in 2010, this film obviously took a while in post.

With so many actors in such a short running time, it shouldn't be surprising that many of them get little to do. I haven't even mentioned Kevin Tye, who gets killed off so quickly that he hasn't even made it onto the film's IMDb page. Stevens is there for a very specific reason so his part is just right, but Tye, Rosete, Dean, Harrelson, Todd, even Leighton, all deserve a little more screen time. At least they are very much supporting actors here, but even the more prominent names get surprisingly little to do. It's Shepis who gets the most screen time but she gets little to do with it, at least kicking off with a topless dance routine and finding her way quickly into peril and out of it. She isn't top billed though, that honour given to Kane Hodder as Sheriff Sickle, presiding over all the overtly gratuitous gore on show. The title change doesn't do him any justice, as much of the brooding presence he had in the title role is lost as he becomes just another character. Like most of the cast, he does what he's asked but should have had more to do.

There are two other prominent actors in the same boat. Rena Riffel is another actor brought in from out of state, but she's particularly sidelined, even if she gets an exotic dance of her own. As Penny, she's tasked with little more than playing a stereotypically dumb blonde stripper who inadvertently puts Yakov on the trail of the thieves. The other is Dan Higgins, who thankfully succeeds where most of these actors failed, by stamping his presence on the film so emphatically that he's who I remember most when I think about it. That's a notable accomplishment when the lead is a force of nature and both Shepis and Riffel deliver pole dances, but his role is as a backwoods gas station owner. He's consistently note perfect, but his real scene to shine is the one when Yakov walks in and asks how he can find the thieves who are clearly here in town. It's a wonderful scene, a great adaptation of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, because Mordin defies Yakov in ways he never imagined. Both actors ought to win, but Higgins takes it.

That's the best scene in the film, even if, like most of the rest, it deserved to run longer. Others are much more exploitative, outrageous and/or gruesome, but Conway lets loose with the gore far more than any of the other elements he plays with. The nudity is restricted to early scenes and sex is rarely suggested. The cool angle to neo-grindhouse isn't prominent in the dialogue, which is relatively routine and mostly shorn of bad eighties puns, or the enhancements to the bonnet of Sheriff Sickle's car, which are wasted in this cut, even if they were given a use in my memory of the one I saw at Phoenix Comicon. Esther Goodstein deserves a mention as Sickle's wife, even if her cool role is restricted so far as to be a prop, yet another reminder that everything in this film is strong and consistent but used too sparsely. It would be better if the Necro Wars footage was stripped and every character and every scene bulked up so that this would run ninety or even a hundred minutes. As it is, it's a promise rather than a delivery.

Tennessee's Partner (2014)

Director: Travis Mills
Stars: Mikal Benion, Andre Stephens, Michael Rivers, Jason Tucker, Hanifah Holsome, Billy Williams, Gus Edwards and Dre Ducati

I remembered Tennessee's Partner pretty well from its festival screening. It stood out at the time because it had an all black cast, the pace was notably slow and the music was a little different to the films around it. After rewatching, it's the genre that stands out as Mills converted it into a completely different style to the 1869 story by Bret Harte. Harte is mostly known for his early work that surrounds the California gold rush, so westerns. Tennessee's Partner is one of his most remembered stories, enough that it's inspired a following. Allan Dwan directed a feature in 1955 with Ronald Reagan in the title role, playing what Peter Bogdanovich described as 'his most likeable performance.' Parts of the western musical Paint Your Wagon are clearly inspired by it, as is the Four Seasons song Big Girls Don't Cry, at least in the memory of lyricist Bob Gaudio, as recounted in Jersey Boys; he thought he was watching John Payne in Tennessee's Partner, when it was really John Payne in Slightly Scarlet. Anyway, Travis Mills turns it into an urban gangster flick.

It's an odd story, with an odder ending. I literally reread the last couple of paragraphs half a dozen times to figure out exactly what Harte was trying to say. Initially I thought he'd turned his western into a ghost story, but really he was emphasising the brotherly love between Tennessee and the unnamed character known only as Tennessee's Partner. It's a strong one because it had already survived the sort of incident which would set most brothers at each other's throats. After Tennessee's Partner had brought back a wife to the fancifully named Poker Flat, Tennessee promptly stole her away for himself. Yet when he returned, without her, as she'd been stolen away in turn by another, the Partner met him with a handshake and not an ill word said. No wonder the similarly nameless narrator (Harte makes it clear that names have little meaning in Poker Flat) felt it important to tell the tale of this forgiving man who met betrayal with loyalty. He's a simple and serious man, who risks his life for his partner and whose dying thoughts are of him.

Mills actually keeps most of the story intact, even with its translation to east side gangster story. He kicks things off at the point where Tennessee returns and tells it primarily through the gossip of two black men who sit on a porch and drink. As is appropriate for a Bret Harte story, they aren't given names but they're played by Billy Williams and Running Wild Films co-founder Gus Edwards and the dialogue is strong. This is a good way to fill in background and both of them are easily up to it. As neither of them is likely to ever leave that porch unless its to get a fresh bottle, it falls instead to Mikal Benion's character, who sits there listening but never saying a word, to literally take us with him to witness the consequences of the events they're gossiping about. Quite why he's such an obvious tail I have no idea. Maybe Mills read 'simple and serious' in another fashion entirely. Maybe his Partner is happy for someone to tell his story. Maybe it's all conjured out of the mind of Benion's character, of which more later.

What Mills cuts out is the ending, not only those last couple of paragraphs that I had to reread but quite a few before it too. In Harte's story, Tennessee is known to be a gambler and suspected to be a thief, but he apparently gets a little too blatant and is consequently tried for armed robbery. Quite whether this is true or not is open to debate, given that he's caught and tried by the man he allegedly robbed, a Judge Lynch no less, in one day, then hanged and buried the next. The wings of justice were ever swift in the old west, but they weren't always just, especially with the word 'lynch' in play. Even with his translation to gangster flick, Mills keeps it all consistent up until the trial, merely substituting the real judge for a local crime lord merely nicknamed 'the Judge', again an appropriate switch for a Bret Harte story in which everyone goes by a nickname whether they need one or not. After that, he takes a couple of details from the story and gives them a whole new meaning, thus providing an intriguingly new and more substantial ending.

I liked Tennessee's Partner when I first saw it, but that ending is what's staying with me from this viewing. It's appropriate to quote a western here, given that's what Harte wrote, so I'll quote the memorable line from the ending of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance which said that, 'When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.' Everything in Tennessee's Partner, both the original story and this adaptation of it, are legend, recounted by a nameless narrator about characters whose real names he doesn't know. It's very possible that he transcribed hearsay to go with what he saw, or perhaps just made stuff up. The truth is so far hidden behind the words that we can only guess at it. Mills taps into this with an adaptation that does the same. If Benion's character is the narrator, ironic as he never speaks, he does the same thing: watching and listening and turning it all into an unreliable story. It's always possible that he's recounting the legend to us just as much as the old gossips told parts of it to him. But hey, it's a good legend.

Jane Doe (2006)

Director: Jane Fendelman
Star: Jane Fendelman

Jane Doe is rather unlike any movie I've seen before and that plays in its favour. I don't know quite what I expected going in but I guess it was some combination of the words, 'cancer' and 'documentary'. In 2005, Jane Fendelman was diagnosed with grade three breast cancer, its most aggressive form, and that meant a 40% chance of survival. In other words, it was likely that she was going to die. That's hardly the best of news at any time but it also served as a double red underline to the annus horribilis that was her 2004, in which her father had died, she'd suffered a miscarriage and her husband had left her for a friend. At this point, you might expect that the arrival of aggressive cancer and a 60% chance of death might prompt a submission, where Jane would give up, roll over and let death take the bad times away. She emphatically did not do that. She made this film instead. 'I'm a caterpillar and I'm going into a cocoon,' she explains. 'In seven months I'm going to come out with wings... everything I think and feel will be different.'

And above all, that's what this film is: a document of one person's surprising reaction to imminent death, in which she struggles through the obvious knowledge that cancer is the big, bad bogeyman who scares the crap out of a lot of people to the realisation that it's a heck of a lot more than that. Perhaps the most quotable film I've ever watched, the most important line comes when Jane suggests that, 'Maybe cancer is such a gift because it strips away everything you thought you were.' It's an unorthodox approach but a telling one, because Jane is one of the most alive people I know. I didn't know her in 2005, when she went through this, or in 2006, when she released this video diary of that time, but I know her now and it would be difficult to think of anyone with more drive. The reasons why are the building blocks of this film, as we don't really watch her struggle with cancer, instead we watch her struggle with what it means: to her, to her life and to the world around her. And she ends up realising that she's a butterfly.

If that doesn't make a lot of sense, it's because Jane Doe is less of a story and more of an immersion into the mind of someone reevaluating who she is, a sort of braindump that I might describe as chemo addled if only it didn't contain so much fundamental insight. In fact it's much easier to explain what the film isn't than what it is. It isn't a medical journey, for a start, because cancer isn't the focus here, it's far more of a MacGuffin, given that everything in this film revolves around it but it doesn't do anything (from our point of view) except serve as a catalyst for Jane's change. We do meet a doctor but he provides little medical detail and Jane isn't able to add much either; attempting to explain why steroids are being added to her chemotherapy cocktail, she only manages, 'It protects you or does something.' This is not going to help anyone learn what cancer is or what it does to the human body. The closest it gets is to hammer home the point that chemotherapy makes your hair drop out, hardly news at eleven.

It's not even a traditional video diary, of the sort that chronicles a journey through treatment. There isn't much treatment, at least in the film, because primarily we're focused on Jane's mind more than her body. There are few points where anything directly leads to anything else, so there's no real progression on the medical side. In fact, we have little idea of time, tracking it mostly through the various stages of hair loss. This is because Jane didn't edit down her 150 hours of footage chronologically, attempting more to catch the progression of her inner thoughts. This ends up highly appropriate because it echoes how epiphanies didn't arrive at once, they were gradual realisations, piecing together bits from here and there to form an idea and the ideas to grow into a mindset. It's quite clear that Jane is rarely completely lucid, the disease hitting her hard and the chemotherapy treatments messing with her head. It means that her narrative is a rambling thing but, like her thoughts, it gradually coalesces into a big picture.

The rambling is only one reason why it's a difficult film to watch. There are many moments where we drift away, but never for the usual reasons. I often drift away from the screen while watching movies but, most of the time, it's because they're boring and I eventually realise that I'm not watching any more and return to figure out what I missed and why I should care. Here, it's never boredom that made me drift. There are moments that are uncomfortable, emotional, private, repetitive, rambling, each of which shifted my eyes away but never fully and never for more than just moments. There's too much here that's magnetic, real, true, meaningful, wise. If some moments made me look away, others refused to let me blink. Unlike most documentaries, where what we're shown builds to a point, the points here leap out of nowhere when we least expect them. One moment, Jane is rambling again, unable to form a coherent sentence, and then she's blistering out entire paragraphs of directly quotable material.

And those scenes, if such a word can be applied to a movie where almost all we see is Jane's face talking into a video camera, are the best ones, because they're immense moments. They emphasise that behind the woman struggling with pain and disease, there's a mind that's connecting dots to realise vast truths and finding a way to give them a voice through the cocktail of drugs in her system. There's a much more traditional documentary moment later in the film, where Jane takes off a scary pink wig to show her mum her bald head for the first time and she leans over and kisses it. It's an irresistible moment, the sort that trailers were designed to highlight, but it's out of place here because it's part of a sequence that involves other people. It's a moment for the video diary that this isn't rather than the video diary that this is. Every time the camera widens its scope to introduce Jane's mother or sister, doctor or hairdresser, it leaves the movie where Jane tells us secret truths and becomes a lesser, more traditional documentary.

Those moments mostly serve to highlight where the real value is here, which is in Jane talking directly at us through the fourth wall. She's so blissfully open and honest that it's sometimes difficult to take, feeling like we're intruding on her privacy, but it's clearly important for her to let everything out, to unburden her mind as she searches for who she really is. There are points where she looks great and points where she really doesn't. There are points where she's bouncy, surely buoyed by energy gifted by the steroids in her chemo drugs, and points where she's subdued, lost, wiped out. There are points where the reasons to go on are clearly there in the forefront of her mind and points where they're gone, hiding beyond her reach. All these serve as jigsaw pieces that she gradually connects as the film runs on, building a picture of the butterfly which she'll become. What there aren't are points where she's embarrassed. 'I can't remember the last time I was embarrassed,' she says late in the film. It exists because of that as much as cancer.

It's inevitably a tough picture, because this isn't light hearted subject matter and because of the lack of conventional progression. What's hilarious is how well it plays technically. I may know Jane because she's a strong fixture, a force of nature even, in the local film scene, but she wasn't in 2005 because that side of her was one of many that found their way out after her metamorphosis. She shot this on a home video camera, mostly through simply sitting in front of it but occasionally by hauling it out with her too. It's not difficult to notice that she was the entire crew for most of the film, with the addition of a cameraman only when she's really out wandering. Yet, amazingly, we can hear everything she says, with less background noise than half the entries to local film challenges this year. We can see everything we need to, however sucky the camerawork and the lighting. Jane may not have much of a grasp of what day it is throughout, but she still provides better sound than many people with actual sound equipment. That's hilarious.

It's also ironic because it's much less important here than it would be in most films. It doesn't matter how bad the lighting is, because all we need to do is to see Jane as she pours out her thoughts and lets us in on the moments that matter to her as she goes through this journey. Sometimes those are as apparently meaningless as singing along to music, a hairdresser praying for her or her dog licking her face, but they clearly mean as much to her as more serious moments like the discovery that the focus on lumps in her left breast hid the fact that there's a lump in her right one too. The film is that personal and ultimately it's precisely why it succeeds. We begin the film knowing nothing but 'cancer' but we come out of it knowing Jane, because people are bigger than disease, especially when they're as strong and open to reinvention as she is. I've reviewed her in short films (and a play) portraying a variety of roles, but all of them came after the most important role she's ever had to play: herself.

She also provides her best lines, enough that they could easily be compiled into a short volume of truth. I'll settle for a paragraph, and skip over trite (if true) ones like, 'I'm happy that I'm alive' and the first line in the film, 'This is the story of the healing of a broken heart.' The substantial lines come later. 'I feel like I can do anything now,' she suggests in the depths of treatment. 'Anybody can do anything and it's really easy.' You just have to choose to do it. She tears up less facing death than losing her hair, but it's really all about change: 'I keep on being scared to go to sleep because I don't know who I'll be when I wake up.' Eventually she embraces being bald, because each step in the process makes it more real. 'When it's not real, it's like fighting a ghost,' she says. 'If I'm going to have cancer, I want to have the full experience.' These aren't the lines of Lifetime movies of the week, they're the lines of someone going into her cocoon, being addled by chemo drugs, finding her own personal truth and coming out a butterfly.

Important sources:
Niki D'Andrea - Jane Doe: A Phoenix Woman's Battle with Breast Cancer Becomes an International Documentary Success at the Phoenix New Times Blogs (2008).

Those Love Pangs (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.

After highlighting that Chaplin's famous perfectionism was starting to show in the way he was mastering individual aspects of filmmaking in his last four films, I should point out immediately that very little of the sort appears to be evident in Those Love Pangs, clearly a lesser entry in Chaplin's late Keystone period. I should add that there's a good reason for this. Jeffrey Vance cites studio boss Mack Sennett as explaining the changes that took place during development. Apparently Chaplin started out on this one reel picture with the simple idea of Charlie and Chester Conklin as rivals for the amorous attentions of their landlady. You can easily imagine some of where that idea would be likely to take them, but it quickly went a great deal further, so far that it expanded into a two reel comedy, Dough and Dynamite, often regarded as the best of Chaplin's Keystone pictures. With all that development diverted, Those Love Pangs became little more than an afterthought, devoid of much of the care and attention we're getting used to from Chaplin.

That's not to say that he didn't work on the little details, because there are still some magnificent points that fit into the progression we've been seeing. However the big picture is notably weak, rather unsure as to what it wants to be. The best part is the beginning, which is closest to the original goal of the short. With their landlady outside their door, each of the boys position themselves to be the one who will greet her. Charlie's first in line, but Chester outmanouevres him by suggesting that there's a woman under the table. When Charlie's curiosity, not to mention his gullibility, gets the better of him, Chester nips out to grasp the landlady's hand. Charlie's response is violence, as it so often was in the Keystone shorts, but it's a calm and thoughtful sort of violence for a change. He picks up a fork from the table, tests it, thinks about it, lines himself up and jabs Chester hard in the backside, spoiling his moment. He even puts it to his mouth afterwards to pretend that it's a makeshift mouthharp. It's very thoughtfully done.

Of course, if Chester has his moment to shine with the landlady, Charlie's surely going to get one too and this is even more thoughtfully done. Of course, Chester picks up the fork and prepares to reprise the gag, but Charlie's no fool. Realising that he's in precisely the wrong spot, he carefully switches places with the girl. Then he realises that he's inadvertently set her up, so tries to manoeuvre them both into positions of safety. Of course, it doesn't work as the landlady rejects his advances by pushing him backwards at just the right time for the fork to hit its intended target. Chaplin is superb here, pantomiming for sure, but in a much more subtle way than was usual at Keystone. Conklin isn't bad either and the pair of them do work well together, but not so well as Chaplin did with Roscoe Arbuckle in The Rounders. What's most notable about the rest of the film isn't so much where they go and what they do but who they meet while they're doing it. One scene in and the landlady is apparently forgotten.

Charlie's all set for the bar, cunningly conning his rival out of a coin, but he's immediately distracted by a slim brunette who waltzes past and looks enticingly at him. She's Vivian Edwards, in her sixth film, five of which were Chaplin pictures. This is the most audiences had got to see of her thus far and she's suitably delightful, as promised by her role as one of the Goo Goo sisters in The Property Man. Her fellow sister in that film, Cecile Arnold, promptly shows up here too, as a similarly delightful blonde who looks more than enticingly at Chester; she actively calls him over, by name too if I'm not very much mistaken. I'm no lip reader but it's so clear that I don't think I need to be. The difference, of course, is that Charlie is promptly run off by a tall man who shows up to steal the brunette's affections instead, while the blonde is all over Chester, so flagrantly that Charlie throws his hands up in disbelief at his rival's astounding success, then prepares to leap into the lake to literally drown his sorrows.

What's notable isn't who's playing the girls, as both were regulars at this point in Chaplin's pictures. Had Cecile Arnold appeared in The Rounders, it would have meant she'd been in as many as Edwards and in all the same ones too; presumably they came as a double act. What's notable is what they are, which is something that's generated something of a debate amongst silent film aficionados. In a silent film, with few intertitles, we can't know for sure, but the suggestion is that they're a pair of prostitutes. Or perhaps only one of them is, or maybe the other. Who knows? Well, beyond the suggestion that two such elegant ladies might possibly be interested in a couple of gentlemen who look like Charlie and Chester, who's in an outfit that somewhat mirrors Charlie's in that it clearly doesn't fit properly and in many similar ways, the blonde sticks her boot up on a bench that Charlie's sitting on, pulls a wad of cash out of it, counts it carefully and puts it into Chester's pocket. Are we to believe that she's paying him?

No, surely we're to believe that she's a lot more to Chester than just a blonde in a park. If she knows his name, lavishes him with kisses and gives him a chunk of cash to boot, Occam's razor suggests that he's her pimp. There are a number of other possibilities, of course, but that's by far the most obvious. Maybe he's really her boyfriend and he'd loaned her some cash, but then what's he doing chasing the landlady, what's she doing hanging out in the park on her lonesome and why does she have the cash secreted in her boot? Maybe she is only a random girl in the park whom Chester cleverly enlists into an elaborate scheme to pull a fast one on Charlie. Maybe there really is no accounting for taste and we shouldn't get so caught up in how to interpret an innocent situation. No, I don't buy it either, especially as the girls are with whoever has money at any time, even Charlie after they drift away to the nickelodeon and suddenly find him very agreeable company in the front row. They're prostitutes and at that point he has the cash.

While the quality of the material generally deteriorates as the film runs on, there are other moments that are worthy of note. Chaplin is still finding new and innovative uses for his cane. He reprises its use as the means to pull someone towards him that he did so notably in His New Profession, here dragging Chester along behind him as they leave the house and down its front steps. Later he does exactly the same thing to the tall man who hooked his brunette; he hooks him in return, right into the lake. Later still, he uses it repetitively on Chester, pulling him in to bounce him off his belly in a strange sort of fighting style that he might have learned from Arbuckle. A little more subtly, he also finds two uses for the other end: to clean his nails and pick his teeth. I'm less sure about another lauded moment, but I did find some charm in the way Charlie talks with his feet in the theatre because his hands are occupied around the girls' shoulders. The idea of using an upside down Chester as a temporary seat was more fun to me.

What all this means is that the details here are often praiseworthy, even if the film itself fails to maintain even a modicum of consistency. It starts out like the hotel pictures, hints at becoming a bar picture (one of the reissue titles is The Rival Mashers), becomes instead a park picture and eventually a movie theatre picture. Rather than building a frenetic pace by bouncing us between these settings, as Chaplin did in His New Profession, he merely shifts the action gradually from one to the next without any of them seeming to benefit. Most of it takes place in the park, where we're reminded of Chaplin's famous quote to Sennett that, 'All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.' Here he had all three and two of the latter to boot. The time spent at the nickelodeon is especially sparse, with the inevitable eventual chaos restricted to a few gags and a few seconds before Charlie finds himself thrown through the screen. He'd already made better films in each of these settings and some that used all of them.

Shooting was quick, taking only four days compared to the nine for The New Janitor before it and eight for Gentlemen of Nerve after it. The Rounders only took four days too, but it doesn't show its seams the way this one does. Sure, there was a crowd of people on the opposite side of the lake during the finalé of that picture, but there's little that Keystone could do about that in a public park. Here, there are at least two goofs that could have been fixed. The first is the number of obvious onlookers reflected in the door of the bar from whose delights Charlie is distracted by Vivian Edwards. My better half noticed the second a little later in the park, when Charlie first sits down on a bench; someone peeks over the bush behind him, only to vanish quickly, presumably when he realises that he's just interrupted a live shot. Surely the main flaw here lies in how quickly the film was put together. Chaplin had to finish up, so he could make Gentlemen of Nerve before shifting straight into Dough and Dynamite, which the original idea of this film became.

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

Those Love Pangs 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 debuted in The Mack Sennett Collection Vol 1.