Release Date: 4 September 1916
Writer/Director: Charles Chaplin
Duration: 24 mins
With: Edna Purviance, Eric Campbell, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White, Albert Austin, John Rand, James T. Kelley, Frank J. Coleman
Story: Both a tailor (Campbell) and his assistant (Chaplin) crash the extravagant party of ‘Miss Moneybags’ (Purviance) in the guise of the missing Count Broko, who then arrives in the shape of Leo White…
Production: Following the radical departure of One A.M., a virtual solo turn from Charlie Chaplin, the comedian was back on more familiar ground with his September 1916 release, The Count. Recalling films such as A Jitney Elopement, and playing off a staple of silent comedies of the time, The Count is a mistaken identity tale in which Chaplin’s Tramp impersonates the title character, a faux member of the aristocracy.
Here the Tramp is found working as a tailor’s assistant, only to be drawn into the tailor’s masquerade as a would-be Count. Chaplin’s now regular foil Eric Campbell played the extravagantly bearded tailor who attends a party thrown by the object of his affections, Edna Purviance’s ‘Miss Moneybags’. To impress her, the tailor pretends to be better off financially and socially than he really is. The Tramp is at the same party, initially attempting to woo the cook in the face of competition from the forces of law and order. The pair of tailors encounter one another, of course, and after a brief period of co-operation, they find themselves in competition for the attentions of ‘Miss Moneybags’. The Tramp is mistakenly introduced as the Count, while Campbell is indicated to be his secretary, when the plan the pair hatched was supposed to be the other way around. The subterfuge only works as it is a fancy dress ball.
In Eric Campbell Chaplin had found the perfect authority figure. Not only did his physical size connote wealth and prosperity, but his beard was also seen as a symbol of the ruling class, the rich in opposition to the Tramp’s representation of the poor. Chaplin’s physical response to this stimulus was to repeatedly pull on poor Campbell’s beard (whether fake or not, it can’t have been pleasant), thus giving visual life to the idea of poking fun at authority, or as Simon Louvish puts it in Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey: ‘…the spectacle of the “great and the good” having their whisker’s pulled…’
Campbell was to suffer mightily at the hands, fists and feet of Chaplin in order that he should pay the price of being the on-screen representative of cruel wealth or privilege. As well as tugging on his chin whiskers, Chaplin would often give Campbell several swift kicks up the backside, not-so-innocently stamp on his already sore foot and kick the poor fellow in his ample stomach: he even got to drive off the edge of a Los Angeles pier and into the water. Louvish highlights Campbell’s impressive ability to present himself as a ‘cartoon character’ as part of the success of The Count and several of the other Mutual shorts.
Thankfully, Chaplin’s developing approach to his art can be visually chronicled during this period as many of the discarded out-takes from The Count have survived (despite Chaplin’s insistence that they be destroyed). It is clear from this material that Chaplin largely shot his work in story order, from a rough outline he’d developed. ‘Sometimes a story would present a problem,’ wrote Chaplin in My Autobiography (1964). ‘I would have difficulty in solving it. At that juncture I would lay off work and try to think, striding up and down my dressing room in torment or sitting for hours at the back of a set, struggling with the problem. Sometimes the solution came at the end of the day when I was in a state of despair, having thought of everything and discarded it; then the solution would suddenly reveal itself … the beautiful mosaic I had been looking for!’
The existence of several excised sequences with low shot numbers suggests that Chaplin had originally intended to begin the film as a ‘comedy of below stairs intrigue’, according to Chaplin biographer David Robinson. Featured in the deleted footage are the characters of a butler and a policeman who are hardly to be seen in the completed version of The Count.
Following his dalliance with this plot, the shot number progressions suggest that Chaplin moved on to his aristocratic impersonation plot, seen not only in A Jitney Elopement, but in various forms in Caught in a Cabaret and Her Friend the Bandit. The finished movie’s opening scene in the tailor’s shop seems to have been a late addition to establish the connection between those characters (around whom the finished film revolves), at least according to the shot numbers. It is likely that the original opening for the film was the Tramp’s arrival at the Moneybags’ residence, which now follows his firing by the tailor. David Robinson points out a gem of a scene lost from The Count (pictured above): ‘Charlie sits cross-legged, industriously sewing a garment, only to discover that he has firmly attached it to his own trousers.’
Documentary filmmaker Kevin Brownlow revealed some of the rediscovered Chaplin outtakes in the notable British television series Unknown Chaplin (1983). He notes in his book The Search for Charlie Chaplin that very little of this material showed that Chaplin had rejected the footage on technical grounds, but always as the result of a creative choice. Some of the material was made up of filmed rehearsals, such as those for City Lights (1936), in which Chaplin worked out bits of business that he could then review later by watching the resulting film. Brownlow noted: ‘There is nothing like this in the Mutuals. But in one shot from The Count (included in Programme 1) Chaplin leaps into the arms of a cook. In doing so, he moves the kitchen table. While continuing the scene, he pulls the table back into position.’
With The Count, Chaplin’s director of photography Rollie Totheroh continued to innovate in moving the camera during comedy sequences, especially in the way it follows a pair of dancing couples in the ballroom scenes. While Chaplin was not yet fully engaged in the kind of things he could do specifically with the camera, he was—under Totheroh’s guidance—beginning to think more about how he could use its unique properties in his comedy filmmaking, short of classic film tricks. There was plenty of material to work with: for the Mutual shorts which would each be completed at around 1800 feet in length, sometimes as much as 30 to 90 thousand feet of film could be exposed in search of the right comedy moments.
In The Seven Lively Arts (1924), cultural critic Gilbert Seldes celebrated the climax of The Count as an example of Chaplin’s growing tendency to move away from the improvised chaotic comedy of Keystone and Essanay in his Mutual films, towards a more studied form of comedy that nonetheless came across to the film viewers as being spontaneous. ‘[Charlie] is fleeing pell-mell through every room in the house; the whole movement grows tense; the rate of acceleration perceptively heightens as Charlie slides in front of a vast birthday cake, pivots on his heel, and begins to play alternate pool and golf with the frosting, making every shot count like a machine gunner barricaded in a pillbox or a bandit in a deserted cabin. It was foreordained that the improvised kind of comedy should give way to something more calculated … for a long time [Chaplin] continued to give the effect of [the] impromptu…’
Unlike One A.M., The Count boasts a variety of settings, from the tailor’s shop to the kitchen set and, biggest of all, the home of the very rich ‘Miss Moneybags’ that features its own ballroom. One scene from this location, in which Chaplin kicks another character while continuing to cut a dash on the dance floor, was reportedly subject to three weeks of intense filming until the creator felt he’d got what he was looking for. The scene was accompanied by live music from a hired-in orchestra who played on endless repeat, and who were presumably happy to take advantage of Chaplin’s (and Mutual’s) largesse. This dance sequence was certainly the focus of Chaplin’s time and attention during the production of The Count. A former colleague from Chaplin’s music hall days, Chester Courtney, worked on the scene and recalled in an 1931 issue of Film Weekly that the hired orchestra were repeatedly playing They Call it Dixieland.
In One A.M., Chaplin’s athletic grace is once more on display during this extended scene. His sliding around and repeated performance of ‘the splits’ is topped off by the moment when he hooks his cane to a chandelier in order to right himself once more. It’s an inventive little throwaway moment, but the kind of visual gag that marked Chaplin out: who knows how many takes it took until he achieved that ‘just so’ moment to his own satisfaction?
As before in these types of comedy, Chaplin’s playing as entitled sees him forgiven all his bad behaviour as long as the others at the party think he is ‘one of them’. As soon as that masquerade is exposed, the same behaviour is an excuse for reprisal. This was Chaplin’s way of highlighting the iniquities in early 20th century American society as he saw it as something of an outsider. His terrible table manners (especially in his eating of a huge slice of watermelon), awful treatment of his fellow guests, and his unbridled pursuit of ‘Miss Moneybags’ are all forgiven thanks to his perceived status, with the worst on offer being ‘disapproving looks’ according to Joyce Milton in Tramp. Milton suggests that this reflected Chaplin’s real-life growing status in LA society: he was within them but not really one of them. In fact, Chaplin saw his association thanks to his fame with those better educated and accomplished than him as an opportunity. According to Milton he ‘more or less consciously used them as mentors in a programme of self-improvement’.
In The Art of Charlie Chaplin, John Kimber calls The Count ‘a masterful demonstration of Charlie’s benignly disruptive foreignness’, a film that explores Chaplin’s ‘comedy of incomprehension’ while revealing the clown’s ‘evident pleasure in his own creative flights of fancy’. Against a perhaps overly familiar backdrop and amidst a host of very familiar characters and comic archetypes, Chaplin nonetheless manages to develop some original comic business thus making this kind of tale one worth retelling, especially as his filmmaking style had advanced markedly since those earlier ‘imposture’ shorts from his earlier knockabout days.
There’s a developing maturity to Chaplin’s comedy, and his characters, through the series of Mutual shorts that was largely absent from his Keystone and Essanay periods (with a few notable exceptions such as The Tramp).—Brian J. Robb
Charlie Says: ‘Why should a man exert himself needlessly [with exercise]? Don’t I go to work every morning with my dinner pail, like a stevedore? Why should I swing dumbells when I have to throw people around so as to break things with them every day? And as for hanging [on] to swinging bars, I call a chandelier my second home. I love walking. I walk in crowds, downtown, and think out my plots. People are so sad and so funny, so pathetic and so absurd. I like to frequent parks and cafeterias and other places where crowds go.’—Los Angeles Sunday Times, August 1916
Trivia: A real tailors shop—J. Dronjensky Ladies Tailors on Santa Monica Boulevard—was used as the location for the beginning of The Count. As with some of Chaplin’s earliest ‘on location’ films, the reflection of the watching crowd can be seen in the window of the store, as pointed out by location hunter extraordinaire John Bengtson. In his book Silent Traces, Bengtson reveals the location has now been replaced by an ‘All Mart’ store, part of a larger strip mall. That’s progress.
The Contemporary View: ‘Charlie Chaplin, millionaire movie man who cavorts for your pleasure if you have a dime, ambled into view as a bogus count today and raised peels of laughter from the loop to the limits … All of which is sufficient to indicate that Charles is back with some of his old time slapstick work that will chase the blues and make you forget to speculate on the probable length of the war.’—Chicago Daily News, September 1916
Verdict: A simple tale, simply told, but fun.
Next: The Pawnshop (2 October 1916)
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