With: G. M. ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson, Marguerite Clayton, Lee Willard, Hazel Applegate, Charlie Chaplin, Lloyd Bacon, Snub Pollard
Story: A burglar is persuaded to change his ways after he breaks into the home of a society woman who’d earlier shown him some kindness.
Production: Included here for the sake of completeness, His Regeneration is not really a Chaplin short at all. It is, instead, a ‘Broncho Billy’ Anderson film in which Chaplin makes a brief cameo, just as Anderson did earlier in Chaplin’s The Champion. Gilbert Anderson—known as Billy—was, of course, one of the two co-founders of Essanay studios alongside George Spoor.
Chaplin’s appearance is confined to the opening sequence in the dance hall which serves to set up the dramatic dilemma for Anderson’s leading character. This features some basic Chaplin fun as he attempts to chat up a woman, chats with the house band, and then is caught up in a whirling dervish of dancing couples (influencing future scenes featuring Chaplin in such films as Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and The Immigrant).
As well as appearing briefly in the film (and his appearance would no doubt have been recognised and cheered as an unexpected surprise by filmgoers in 1915, even though he is credited as appearing in this short at the beginning where Anderson is noted as having been ‘slightly assisted’ by Chaplin!), Charlie Chaplin is also credited as having written the scenario. This is interesting, as apart from his own clowning business, this is a straight-forward drama, the first time Chaplin had written anything like this for the screen. It shows his continuing evolving interest in moving away from basic fall-about comedy into other areas of cinematic expression. His films from here on would continue to feature ever more developed dramatic scenarios as well as comic moments.
It has been speculated (by, among others, The Chaplin Encyclopedia author Glenn Mitchell) that the relationship between Anderson and Chaplin was so good (at least until he quit Essanay) that Chaplin appeared in a variety of now forgotten Essanay/Anderson movies and essentially acted as an associate producer in Anderson’s California-based unit. That may go some way to explain the freedom Chaplin was given in moving his productions back to Los Angeles for his next released short, Work.
Of course, Chaplin had essentially made several ‘guest appearances’ in the work of others more established as film comics during his year at Keystone in 1914, including alongside Fatty Arbuckle in The Knockout. Later he would turn up in Douglas Fairbanks’ 75-minute feature film The Nut (1921)—at the time the pair were establishing United Aritists with Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith—as, of all things, a Chaplin impersonator, whose Tramp costume is—according to The Chaplin Encyclopedia—reportedly slightly wrong and comic business is curiously exaggerated. I say ‘reportedly’ because biographer Jeffrey Vance doubts Chaplin’s inclusion at all: ‘It is clearly a Chaplin imitator, not Chaplin himself, who appears briefly in the party sequence wearing the Tramp costume’ (Check out The Faux Charlot web site for a clip). Chaplin also appears in what is basically a Pickford home movie, Nice and Friendly, also shot in 1921. Furthermore, there is a clip of Chaplin behind the camera directing from the feature film Souls for Sale (1923, previously lost the incomplete film has been screened on TCM in the US and is available on DVD). Roger Ebert noted that producer Samuel Goldwyn ‘must have called in a lot of favours, because there are cameo roles showing Charles Chaplin directing a scene while puffing furiously on a cigarette, Erich von Stroheim allegedly working on Greed, and such other stars as Barbara La Marr, Jean Hersholt, Chester Conklin, and Claire Windsor.’ That same year Chaplin contributed to James Cruze’s Hollywood. He appears as himself, not his Tramp character, in King Vidor’s Show People (1928) alongside Marion Davies, whose autograph he requests.
Trivia: His Regeneration would be one of the influences on the later Chaplin short Police (1916), the last he’d produce for Essanay.
The Contemporary View: ‘Even in the short time at his disposal, Chaplin assists the tale to make a very lively commencement, which is as novel in a production of this kind as it is pleasant.’—Bioscope 1915.
Slapstick: Appearing as his Tramp character, Chaplin accidentally holds hands with a man in the dance hall queue before getting to (briefly) chat up the true object of his affections. The waiter soon shifts the Tramp away from the band, but he’s quickly back amid the dancing crowds, before vanishing from the film altogether!
Verdict: One for completists, but worth checking out, 2/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
Story: A day out at the beach proves eventful for the Tramp: two women catch his romantic eye, much to their annoyance—and that of their husbands!
Production: The first film Chaplin made upon his return to Los Angeles, By The Sea was essentially another ‘quickie’ made to make up for time invested in the making of The Tramp. As with several of Chaplin’s early Essanay shorts, this one recalls several of his Keystone efforts produced with a little more polish, and at just one reel it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. Where The Tramp had revealed new depths to Chaplin’s screen character with the addition of pathos, By The Sea is an unashamed knockabout comedy that reinforced his status as a master of silent pantomime: it would, however, be his final single reeler as he’d outgrown the format’s limitations.
‘By The Sea has all the appearance of having been shot in a day,’ wrote Chaplin’s biographer David Robinson, reinforcing the idea that for this rapidly produced movie Chaplin had fallen back upon Mack Sennett’s tried-and-tested Keystone approach to churning them out. ‘It’s the kind of scenario which would equally have served the commedia dell’arte or Keystone—a series of slapstick and situation variations skilfully managed within the restrictions of only nine camera set-ups,’ concluded Robinson. Glenn Mitchell, in The Chaplin Encyclopedia, described By The Sea as essentially ‘a park comedy without the trees … the impression is of an interim effort designed to maintain the public attention between the more elaborate two-reel subjects’.
Another justification for By The Sea was the need to produce a film while preparation work was being made for the Essanay Chaplin unit to move into the Bradbury Mansion, where the next film, Work, would be shot. The bulk of the filming for By The Sea took place along Ocean Front Walk and around the Abbott Kinney Pier in Santa Monica—the pier as seen in the short was destroyed by fire in 1920, so the film captured it before it was completely rebuilt in 1921. The original pier featured a roller coaster dubbed Race Thru the Clouds which was also seen in the opening scenes of the very first Chaplin short released, Kid Auto Races at Venice. The use of this location, therefore, made a somewhat fitting return to ‘home’ turf for Charlie Chaplin in 1915.
The scenes on the beach of Billy Armstrong mock-strangling Chaplin’s Tramp were filmed near the ‘Venice Plunge’, the largest saltwater bathhouse on the West coast, with the bulk of the Abbott Kinney Pier visible in the background. Further historic sights preserved in this short include the Venice Dance Pavilion, visible behind shots of Edna Purviance, along with the Ship Cafe Restaurant and the 1913 Waldorf Hotel (which still stands today) where Chaplin loses his hat in the wind. The Dance Pavilion, one of the largest dance halls on the Pacific coast, opened in June 1906 with 15,000 square foot of floorspace, more than enough to accommodate up to 800 dancers at any one time. Chaplin also flirts with Edna in Palisades Park in Santa Monica.
At the short’s opening when the Tramp treats himself to a tasty banana—only to slip on the discarded peel minutes later—he’s standing outside the Venice Diamond Cafe, part of the extensive buildings at the entrance to the pier complex. Here tourists could pick-up the so-called ‘Balloon Route’ (as on a map the route outlined a rough balloon shape) railroad ride through downtown Los Angeles to Hollywood and out to the beaches at Santa Monica and Redondo. A round trip cost $1.
While some of the Ocean Front buildings remain today, the pier featured heavily in By The Sea closed down in 1947 before burning down once again shortly thereafter. This area also appeared in Harold Lloyd’s Number Please (1920) and Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman (1928), for those hoping to see more of it. For the changing locations of many of Chaplin’s film, John Bengtson’s brilliantly illustrated book Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin is indispensable and is the result of much dedicated personal detective work on behalf of the author.
Featured briefly in By The Sea, as the ice cream seller, is Snub Pollard. Harry ‘Snub’ Pollard had been born in Melbourne, Australia in 1889 as Harold Fraser. Later recognised through his trademark large drooping moustache, it is possible to spot him in By The Sea (sans moustache) and in several later Chaplin shorts, including His Regeneration (a Billy Anderson short in which Chaplin only makes a cameo), Police (1915) and Triple Trouble (1915). While working at Essanay, Pollard met Hal Roach, who was also based there. ‘Snub’ would hit his stride in the 1920s in the early Harold Lloyd shorts before Roach—who’d set up himself as a producer by then—gave him his own solo series. Perhaps best known is 1923’s It’s A Gift (not to be confused with the W.C. Fields film of the same title) in which he plays a crazy inventor. Pollard would go on to enjoy a decent if not spectacular career, appearing for the Weiss Brothers in the mid-1920s in a series of knockoff Laurel and Hardy style shorts. He later played small roles in talkies, including many Westerns, Hollywood Cavalcade (1939), Miracle on 34th Street (1937) and in Man of a Thousand Faces (1957). Somewhat fittingly, his final film role was a silent part in Twist Around the Clock, made in 1962—he died that same year, aged 72.
Trivia: Chaplin’s increasing fame made it difficult for him to work extensively on location or in public places, as he does for By The Sea. Through watching the film very carefully, it is possible to spot the reflection of a group of assembled curious onlookers in a store window, while behind Chaplin and Armstrong’s strenuous thesping on the beach can be seen a sole sunbather ignoring the crew of comedians, determine they won’t ruin his day out.
The Contemporary View: ‘More irresistible absurdities by the inimitable Charles [Chaplin] … [his] humour needs neither description nor recommendation.’—Bioscope 1915.
Slapstick: Banana peel ahoy—probably the first time Chaplin’s used that hackneyed gag. Hat’s off—thank goodness for those tangled tethers. Beach bums Billy and Charlie bounce around a beachfront bench—at least all that sand makes for a soft landing every time Billy knocks Charlie down. Searching for fleas in Billy’s hair, the Tramp pre-figures a classic routine used in Chaplin’s later Limelight. Enter Edna, exit the Tramp in pursuit. Snub wants paying for the ice cream, but neither of the beach bums seems to have any liquid assets, other than the ice cream they smear on each other’s faces, then Snub’s, then a passer-by’s. While the husbands go at it, the Tramp re-encounters Edna and is even more smitten, at least until her husband returns. The Tramp and the two couples reunite on the beach for a tumbling finale.
Verdict: An entertaining—if inconsequential—trifle with some historic sights, 2/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Paddy McGuire, Lloyd Bacon, Billy Armstrong, Ernest Van Pelt
Story: The Tramp saves a farmer’s daughter from a ruffian and wins a job on the farm as a handyman. When the ruffian returns with friends, it’s up to the Tramp to save the day, and attempt to win the girl…
Production: The Tramp would be the most significant film in the development of Charlie Chaplin’s filmmaking since he first set foot in front of a camera, but before he could make his first true masterpiece he relocated to Los Angeles, abandoning Essanay’s Niles studio in Northern California. He’d essentially reshaped the studio to his exacting needs, but had inconvenienced others in the process, especially studio co-owner ‘Broncho’ Billy Anderson who was struggling to make his own films when Chaplin was monopolising the facilities. Chaplin had also, according to Peter Ackroyd, complained of Niles’ ‘backwoods atmosphere’ and he longed to get back to the city.
At the start of April 1915, Chaplin decided he would rent his own studio facilities in the Los Angeles area where he would continue to produce his films for Essanay. Initially, he took over the Bradbury Mansion at North Hill Street in Los Angeles (as seen in the later Chaplin short, Work) before settling upon Majestic Studios as his new home. The Hill Street Tunnel, near the Bradbury Mansion, was often used by silent comedians as they were able to construct partial sets of high buildings which, when shot in perspective with the city vista, appeared to show the likes of Harold Lloyd or Laurel and Hardy in great jeopardy. Hal Roach would use the Bradbury Mansion as his base for the Harold Lloyd shorts he produced between 1915 and 1920.
With the Chaplin craze in full swing by the spring of 1915, Essanay were desperate to get more ‘product’ into theatres as they feared that Chaplin’s old studio, Keystone, who had far more shorts circulating than Essanay did, would be the major benefactors of their expensive signing’s growing popularity. The problem was that Chaplin was in fact slowing down his work rate rather than increasing it. He’d produced In The Park as a ‘quickie’ to make up for the extra time he’d spent making The Champion. Similarly, after he lavished time and attention on The Tramp, which would send him off in a new direction altogether, Chaplin rapidly produced the single reel By The Sea to keep his bosses at Essanay happy. There would then be a two month gap before Chaplin had a new film on release.
The Tramp, more than any previous Chaplin short, develops the romance and pathos of the character. Shot in just 10 days, The Tramp was, according to Chaplin biographer David Robinson, ‘a staggering leap forward in its sense of structure, narrative skill, use of location and emotional range’. Set on a farm, the short has Chaplin’s Tramp working as a farm labourer (a role he repeatedly fails at—he attempts to milk a cow by pumping her tail). He fights off a gang who are planning to rob the farm and falls in love with the farmer’s daughter, played by Edna Purviance. His new-found happiness is crushed, however, when the daughter’s fiancé arrives. The Tramp despondently leaves the farm and the short ends with what would soon become Chaplin’s signature sign-off: as he walks away down a country road heading for pastures new, the screen irises in upon him, a solitary figure temporarily defeated but soon sure to bounce back.
Chaplin biographer Simon Louvish points out that the word ‘tramp’ to describe the travelling unemployed—as Chaplin’s character would definitively become from here on—first came into use towards the end of the 19th century. It was interchangeable with ‘hobo’, and in 1885 the New York state ‘Tramp Act’ defined a tramp as ‘persons who rove about from place to place begging… vagrants… who stroll over the country without lawful occupation.’ This would be the core of Chaplin’s Tramp character, moving from place to place, always struggling to do the right thing, but often losing out in both work and love.
In The Tramp, Chaplin expended great energy in getting the details right. He filmed on a real farm in Los Angeles and held extensive rehearsals to work out comedy business, much to the chagrin of his co-stars who were unused to working this way. Stan Laurel recalled Leo White telling him of the making of The Tramp: ‘He said they repeated some gags until the actors felt that if they did it one more time they’d blow their corks. He said the business of the crooks going up the ladder was done so many times and in so many variations that they just couldn’t tell what the hell all the fuss was about. That’s what made Charlie a great creator of comedy. He knew that sometimes you have to do a thing 50 times in slightly different ways until you get the very best. The difference between Charlie and all the rest of us who made comedy was that he absolutely refused to do anything but the best. To get the best he worked harder than anyone I know.’
Supposedly, Chaplin had drawn upon a real-life encounter in his creation of The Tramp. He’d met a genuine tramp on the street and invited him into a saloon for lunch, in return asking the man to tell him his life story and of his experiences on the road. For John McCabe, though, this tale of meeting inspiration upon the streets of America was ‘a little too pat, a bit too press agenty’. Wherever the inspiration came from, the approach to this film was very different from anything the comedian had produced at Keystone or so far in his tenure at Essanay.
In producing a more melancholic work, Chaplin knew he was taking ‘an awful chance’, although he felt his pubic was ready for an expansion and a deepening of the Tramp’s overall character. The slapstick knockabout fun of the past was not enough any more to keep Chaplin interested in making movies. From now on, his films would be more concerned with character and dramatic incident, while still providing plenty of laughs although in a more sophisticated form of comedy. His bosses at Essanay were not prepared for the sudden change of tone. In an article headed ‘Chaplinitis’ in a 1915 edition of Motion Picture World, Charles McGurk noted: ‘Down in the projection room at Essanay, the men who passed on [ie. approved] the picture felt a chill across their backs as the Tramp discarded his humour and became pathetic. That chill was fear.’ The Essanay executives may have felt fear witnessing Chaplin’s change of direction in The Tramp, but it seems the public were ready for it. The film was a box office hit.
As it is such an important film in Charlie Chaplin’s developing art, it is worth looking at The Tramp in some considerable detail. For the first time, Chaplin effectively mixes pathos with his trademark knockabout slapstick. Before Chaplin’s adoption of the character, tramps and vagabonds in American movies were generally the villains. They were the characters who held up trains, mugged people in the street and broke into houses when the occupiers were away. They certainly weren’t leading men, and they certainly weren’t comic characters (even allowing for the occasional comedy drunk). Chaplin was making his Tramp not only sympathetic in general, and the hero of his films, but also a figure of romantic interest for his leading lady, Edna Purviance. It was also his first film with a genuinely tragic ending.
The film opens with the Tramp entering the story alone, just as he would exit it at the film’s end. He’s hitchhiking his way across the country, but it proves a dangerous occupation as his close encounters with a couple of speeding cars demonstrate. Appearance is important to him, despite his reduced circumstances, so much so that after falling into the dirt to avoid being run over, the Tramp proceeds to dust himself down so he is presentable for anyone who might stop and offer him a lift. He even loses his lunch to another tramp as he’s too busy buffing his ragged fingernails to eat it immediately. Even after a substitute meal of grass, he is careful to clean his face and hands, as if he were at a polite society dinner party. There’s an inherent dignity to the character of Chaplin’s Tramp that many other comedy creations before this point clearly lacked. His trousers may not fit and his derby may be less than perfect, but he’s a man simply looking to make his way in the world like any other. Despite that, in each film he is a man with no past.
The first action comes when the Tramp gets his revenge on the lunch thief as he thwarts the attempt to steal money from farmer’s daughter, Edna. Although he’d like the money for himself, he likes Edna more so happily returns it. As the farm comes under a sustained assault, the Tramp—as the new farm hand—provides a haphazard defence, involving a brick wrapped in a blow-softening handkerchief. Mischievousness comes naturally to the Tramp, and he can’t resist using a pitchfork to surprise a fellow farm hand. Whether the business with the bag of flour is deliberate or accident is open to question.
The more focused recipient of the Tramp’s mischievous nature is the local clergyman, played by Billy Armstrong who’d featured in minor roles in the Chaplin shorts since His New Job. Armstrong was born in Bristol in England in 1891 and like Chaplin he started performing in vaudeville and music hall alongside a parent, in Armstrong’s case it was his father. For four years from 1910, Armstrong was part of the Fred Karno troupe touring the UK. This connection brought him straight to Chaplin when he reached the US, with The Tramp providing his first major role. He stayed with Chaplin until the end of the Essanay contract, and in 1916 was working at Keystone and then Rolin. Unfortunately, Armstrong’s film career and life were cut short by a bout of tuberculosis and he died in 1924 at the age of just 33. Armstrong’s minister provides much of the straight-forward comedy in The Tramp. The smell of dung on the Tramp’s shoes interrupts the reverend’s attempt to commune with nature, while a rotten egg spoils his prayer book.
However, there’s as much romance as comedy in The Tramp. As in A Jitney Elopement, Chaplin signifies his character’s softer side when he pulls a flower from a bush and tosses it to Edna. This is enough to signify he’s beginning to fall in love with her. He’s motivated, therefore, to help save the farm from the trio of thugs threatening it, and to do so he pretends to join them. It’s the Tramp’s warning that allows the farmer to get off a couple of early shots, although it is the Tramp who gets wounded when one of the raiders plugs him. These scenes are played out as straight drama, rather than knockabout comedy and the aftermath allows the Tramp’s love for Edna to deepen. Recovering from his leg wound, the Tramp is doted on by a grateful farmer’s daughter. He mistakes this kindness during his convalescence as an expression of love on her part. He samples a lifestyle, complete with aromatic cigar and equally pleasing whisky, that he could no doubt get used to.
There lies the centre of this tragi-comic romance. The Tramp gets a taste of a better, more pleasing life than that on the road, only to have it snatched away when Edna’s fiancé turns up. His leg is healed and Edna’s romantic attentions lie elsewhere. There’s nothing left for the heroic Tramp but to slip away, wishing the couple every happiness while inside his heart is breaking. From now on, romantic disappointment will be a core aspect of Chaplin’s depiction of the ongoing life of his ‘little fellow’. As he hits the road once more, it is with a deep sense of melancholy that is evident in his gait. However, as the familiar road welcomes him, his sagging shoulders straighten up and he gets a new spring in his step. Tomorrow is another day and will no doubt bring new adventure, opportunity and—yes—romance.
Trivia: The scene of the Tramp departing at the end of the film was shot along Niles Canyon Road, with him walking away from the studio at Niles—it would also be the last shot taken in Northern California as after this film Chaplin relocated to Los Angeles once more.
The Contemporary View: ‘When you go to see a Chaplin comedy, you know that you will get your full measure of merriment down to the last foot. [The Tramp] is as good as any of them…’—Bioscope, 1915
Slapstick: After tackling the trio of ruffians, who each have a go at getting the money from Edna, the Tramp sets himself on fire at their camp and has to put himself out at a nearby overflow pipe, much to his relief. Most of the physical abuse comes as the Tramp attempts to get to grips with farm life, using pitchforks, bricks, mallets, watering cans, buckets and other implements in ways they were not intended, causing injury and indignity to farm hands and minsters alike.
Verdict: A breakthrough, but while Chaplin’s moving in the right direction, he hasn’t quite mastered the blending of comedy and pathos, 3/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon, Ernest Van Pelt
Story: As her father wants Edna to marry a wealth count, the Tramp impersonates the Count de Lime, until the real thing turns up to spoil things. Later, the Tramp takes Edna for a ride in his car, only for her father, the Count and the cops to set off in pursuit…
Production: By the time he came to make A Jitney Elopement and, especially, his next short The Tramp, Charlie Chaplin had essentially harnessed the Essanay studio machine to his own developing filmmaking needs. His fifth and sixth films released by the studio would signal a new direction and a new maturity in his filmmaking alongside a further evolution for the Tramp. They would also be the last films he produced for Essanay at the Niles studio, preferring to relocate once more to Los Angeles in Southern California.
This was the first film that would focus on developing a romance between the characters played by Chaplin and Edna Purviance (reflecting their off-screen real lives), an area that many of the subsequent films would build further upon. The whole premise of the short develops from the Tramp’s attempts to save Edna from the arranged marriage her father (Ernest Van Pelt) has contracted with Leo White’s Count.
With the Tramp impersonating a member of the aristocracy for the purposes of romance, A Jitney Elopement recalls Chaplin’s Keystone effort, Caught in a Cabaret. The difference between this and his other loose Keystone remakes that preceded it is that A Jitney Elopement uses the basic scenario but develops it far beyond anything he ever achieved at Keystone or even in his first hesitant films produced at Essanay.
The social comedy of the first reel sees Edna’s distraught would-be bride tossing a note explaining her predicament to Chaplin’s Tramp. Catching the note, Charlie takes on the guise of the Count, works his way into the household and is unwittingly wined-and-dined by the bride’s father. Only the arrival of the genuine count puts an end to the Tramp’s domestic charade. Re-encountering the trio in the park, the Tramp rescuses the bride and flees in the Count’s car, closely pursued by the cops.
While A Jitney Elopement—at least in its final section—might be regarded as an ‘action comedy’ or ‘thrill film’, thanks to the spectacular car chase, the opening section features some subtle but germane social comedy. The dinner scene sees the Tramp play the Count, and while his host (the father of his bride-to-be) believes him to be of the upper classes, he overlooks the several ‘social gaffes’ (as Peter Ackroyd dubs them) the Tramp commits. The arrival of the real count causes Ernest Van Pelt’s indulgent host to react against what the Tramp has been doing: it’s as if Chaplin is saying that class excuses everything. As long as his interloper was believed to be of the same class as his host, his actions were regarded as eccentricities. When he’s ‘unmasked’, however, such behaviour in a member of the lower classes (a tramp, indeed!) becomes completely unacceptable. Chaplin’s films always had a streak of social comment running through them, even in the more knockabout Keystone days. From here forward (and really beginning with his next short, The Tramp), Chaplin went out of his way to include such content in his art.
Ernest Van Pelt, playing Edna’s father in A Jitney Elopement, was the latest addition to the Chaplin Essanay repertory company. Born in 1883 in Kansas, Van Pelt was also an assistant director who worked with Chaplin on several shorts including In The Park (1915), in which he also played the sausage seller; Burlesque on Carmen (1916); and Police (1916). He’d also worked with Billy Anderson on a variety of his Broncho Billy shorts, and his brother Homer was also in the film business as a cameraman. Van Pelt died in 1961, aged 78.
As mentioned, A Jitney Elopement features a skilfully realised car chase, the kind of ‘speed’ comedy later more associated with Harold Lloyd primarily. A ‘jitney’, as used here and in several other silent comedy film titles, was the general name for a type of shared taxi service common prior to the 1920s in Los Angeles, with the word drawn from a slang nickname for a nickel, the cost of a ride. It came to denote any form of jalopy or old vehicle, in common with other slang phrases such as ‘flivver’ and ‘Tin Lizzie’, the latter referring specifically to a Model T Ford. Shot on location in San Francisco, the unusual car chase pre-dated Steve McQueen’s acclaimed Bullitt (1968) sequence by some six decades.
The second reel (actually, really just the final five minutes or so) features the material shot in and around San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, including shots of the dramatic still-extant (and restored) Murphy Windmill in the park’s southwest corner. This was the second of the area’s pair of windmills, built in 1905, and the working vanes seen in A Jitney Elopement were removed (or, in some accounts, simply fell off) during the 1940s. The windmill was a gift to the city from banker Samuel G. Murphy, and it was originally used to pump up to 40,000 gallons of water each day for irrigation of the park, freeing the city from costly private water suppliers. Electric pumps soon replaced this mechanism and the windmill fell into disrepair in the years after the Second World War. A long campaign for its restoration finally achieved success in 2012.
The car chase takes in shots along Ocean Beach and the Great Highway (notably unpaved back then—the three storey house visible in several shots is still standing and occupied today), before defying the laws of space and time, but using the magic of film editing, continuing in the Mission District by racing along Folsom Street past ‘Joe Holle Bicycles’. The chase ends with the cop’s car shunted off a pier and into the bay, shot at Fisherman’s Wharf with the US Customs House visible in the background.
Amid the action, Chaplin never forgets that it is character that counts. The opening of the film sees the Tramp holding a flower, suggesting the character’s softer and more emotional or caring side. This would be an image that Chaplin would repeat and develop as his filmmaking became more sophisticated, with the contrast between the freshness and vitality of a flower with the broken down aspect of the Tramp becoming one of the filmmaker’s favourite juxtapositions. Notice, also, in this sequence, Chaplin’s use, as director, of an iris out effect (a circular transition effect achieved in the film developing lab—a facility which Essanay lacked prior to Chaplin’s arrival) to emphasise the detail of the flower. Cinematic technique or clever direction or camerawork was never central to Chaplin’s comedy or Rollie Tothero’s cinematography, but they would develop the ‘iris out’ as a signature finale to many of their shorts beginning with The Tramp.
Chaplin’s increasing popularity during the first half of 1915 was further evident through the bizarre phenomenon of the Chaplin songs and dances. Being a silent comedian, Chaplin himself was not known for his singing (not until Modern Times, 1936, at any rate) and while sometimes balletic in his slapstick, dancing was not his forte either. That made it all the more strange that worldwide there should be a craze for Charlie Chaplin-inspired songs and dances.
In his vaudeville revue comedian Lupino Lane sang and performed ‘That Chaplin Walk’, whose lyrics were quoted by Chaplin biographer David Robinson:
Since Charlie Chaplin became all the craze
Everybody copies his funny old ways
They copy his hat and the curl of his hair
His moustache is something you cannot compare
They copy the way he makes love to the girls
His method really is a treat
There’s one thing ’bout Charlie they never will get
And that is the shoes on his feet, and…
[Chorus]
It doesn’t matter everywhere you go
Watch ’em coming out of any cinema show
Shuffling along, They’re acting like a rabbit
When you’ve seen Charlie Chaplin, you can’t help but get the habit
First they stumble over both their feet
Swing their sticks and look up and down the street
Fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers
All your wife’s relations and half a dozen others
In London, Paris and New York
Everybody does that Charlie Chaplin walk.
Lupino Lane was an English actor and theatre manager born in 1892 (as William Henry George Lupino) who started his performing life while still a child, billed as ‘The Little Nipper’. He worked on stage for years, before graduating to making films during 1915 in Britain. By the 1920s he was in Hollywood and worked with Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle (as had Chaplin). His biggest success, though, came with the 1937 stage musical Me and My Girl, which popularised another ‘walk’-based song, The Lambeth Walk. Perhaps the most famous member of the theatrical Lupino family was Lupino Lane’s niece, Ida Lupino, an actress and director who made her own career in Hollywood from the 1940s and 1970s in film and television.
‘That Chaplin Walk’ was just one of many Chaplin-inspired songs and dances that became popular as his fame spread throughout 1915. There was ‘The Charlie Chaplin Glide’, ‘Those Charlie Chaplin Feet’, the French ‘Charlot One-Step’ and the song ‘The Funniest Man in Pictures’, the lyrics of which (by Marguerite Kendall) included the optimistic lines ‘He tips his hat and twirls his cane/His moustache drives the girls insane’.
The plethora of Chaplin products was enough to suggest to Chaplin’s half-brother Sydney that the Chaplins themselves should be benefitting from Charlie’s fame, not these interlopers. By 1915, Sydney’s own contract at Keystone had expired, so he joined his increasingly famous brother in setting up the Charles Chaplin Music Company and the Charles Chaplin Advertising Service and devoted himself full time to managing his brother’s business affairs. Always wary of those who might exploit him, Chaplin was happy to have a trusted family member looking after his interests.
One exploitation of Chaplin’s image began in 1915, but wouldn’t really catch on for another couple of years. The Chaplins agreed for Essanay to produce a Charlie Chaplin animated cartoon as an instalment in their ongoing ‘Dreamy Dud Draws…’ series. Animator Wallace Carlson was behind ‘Dreamy Dud Draws Charlie Chaplin’ (AKA ‘Dreamy Dud Sees Charlie Chaplin’, released 18 August 1915), in which little lad Dud’s daydreams get him into all sorts of trouble. Drawing heavily on the Little Nemo series, the cartoon has Dud and his dog watching a Chaplin short in a cinema. The animated Tramp falls foul of a mule, a policeman, and a lamppost. The film ends with Dud’s father waking him up from yet another dream… Moving Picture World noted: ‘Wallace A. Carlson has reproduced the moving picture comedian in a very lifelike manner, although some of the feats that Charlie performs in this half-reel cartoon would prove rather difficult for the actor himself.’ The short was made at Essanay’s Chicago studio, where Chaplin had filmed his Essanay debut, His New Job.
While Chaplin could be seen in newspaper cartoon strips, the animated cartoon idea didn’t take off—at least not yet. Further animated Chaplin cartoons would follow in 1916, produced by Pat Sullivan and Otto Mesmer (creators of Felix the Cat). [The animated Chaplin image above is from Sullivan’s later At The Beach].
Trivia: Chaplin’s drawing upon his comedy past stretched far back beyond Keystone for one scene in A Jitney Elopement. When attempting to help himself to a bread loaf, the Tramp slices the loaf in a single long spiral cut, so producing a concertina by the time he’s finished. The gag harked back to Chaplin’s stage days in vaudeville and had—according to David Robinson—been part of Chaplin’s performance when Alf Reeves saw him on stage before recruiting him for the movies.
The Contemporary View: ‘It demonstrates the extraordinary ability of Mr. Chaplin to manufacture [two reels] of lively, knockabout comedy on a plot which is practically threadbare. He is admittedly a wonderful bag of tricks.’—The Cinema (1915).
Slapstick: The Tramp’s enthusiasm for pepper during the soup course causes a mass outbreak of sneezing. His cup of tea proves to be hot stuff… The discovery of the Tramp’s true identity sees him thrown out on his ear—or, rather, by his ear, with a kick up the backside to boot! The Tramp’s self-rolled cigarette disintegrates in his mouth, while the Count’s Top Hat makes for a handy ashtray. Their canes also prove to be effective duelling weapons. The Tramp celebrates vanquishing the Count by rolling his hat along his arm… until the cops arrive. An overenthusiastic embrace of Edna sees the pair take a tumble over a tree branch, twice. Battling with Edna’s father sees the Tramp make further acquaintance with that same branch. Several heel skids by the Tramp lead into the car chase, but only after the Tramp figures out how to start the car. An automotive ballet follows, ending in a splash down and a shy kiss.
Verdict: A film of two halves, with the spectacular car chase making up for the formulaic opening, 3/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon, Margie Reiger, Fred Goodwins
Story: A purloined handbag causes trouble between various couples in the park, while the Tramp gets caught in the middle of it all…
Production: In comparison to the progress made in The Champion, In The Park really is little more than a throwaway trifle, an unfortunate throwback to the slapdash Keystone approach to film comedy. Chaplin’s effort here is slightly better structured than those earlier films (of just a year before), but it is essentially the same formula featuring a variety of characters let loose in a local park who get up to various degrees of slapstick-driven mischief. Even the stolen handbag plot recalls the earlier Twenty Minutes of Love.
In The Park, however, features a slightly more sophisticated and more developed version of the Tramp character. He doesn’t leap automatically to kicking people and tossing bricks (although both feature here) as he would have done during his Keystone incarnation. Instead, there’s some comic business with Bud Jamison’s pickpocket and the other major characters before misunderstandings over the misappropriated handbag sees their disputes turn physical. In among the brief mayhem, the Tramp makes an attempt at romance with Edna Purviance’s nursemaid, with the handbag as a lure.
There’s no doubt that In The Park was seen at Essanay as little more than a ‘quickie’, an attempt to catch up on time lost due to overruns in the making of The Champion. Although Chaplin was beginning to develop his slower, more considered approach to his work (that would see the Essanay releases reduce to one a month later in 1915), here he was still trying to adhere to an artificially imposed schedule, resulting in this Keystone throwback comedy shot in the Niles studio and on location in near-by San Francisco.
Despite the subtle progress, Chaplin’s biographer David Robinson saw some of the Tramp’s actions from In The Park as a step backwards to a more unsavoury version of the character: ‘The Tramp is here at his least ingratiating. He is not only a pickpocket, but a cad as well. Having immobilized big Bud Jamison with a brick, he uses his victim’s open mouth as an ashtray. He even makes awful grimaces behind Edna’s back.’ Peter Ackroyd cuts Chaplin a little more slack, with his interpretation of the response of the audience of 1915 to Chaplin’s antics: ‘Charlie has more poise and dash than in the Keystone comedies, however, and it is easy to understand his immense and growing popularity. Did you see what he did? What is he going to do next? His was a completely different kind of character, and the early audiences were mesmerised by his originality. They had never seen anything like it before.’
By the spring of 1915, Charlie Chaplin was well on his way to becoming a bona fide popular personality the like of which the nascent Hollywood film business had not seen before. Simon Louvish in his book The Tramp’s Odyssey noted: ‘There were even “Charlie Chaplin” girls, who wrote passionate letters and wanted to know if he was married.’ It began to look like Edna Purviance might have had some competition on her hands.
Chaplin could be seen in newspaper cartoon strips, in topical cartoons on political or social issues of the day which used the image of the Tramp to make their point, and in life-size cardboard figures posted outside nickleodeons, often with no accompanying words, to indicate that this cinema was screening Charlie Chaplin shorts. The almost uncontrolled spread of Chaplin merchandising, much of it unofficial (in that it was not endorsed or controlled by Essanay or Chaplin himself) caused the New Jersey Evening News to headline a piece on Chaplin ‘Man Who Has Made Millions Laugh Can’t Be Avoided’, highlighting the ubiquity of the comic figure of the Tramp. As Louvish notes, the merchandising of Chaplin preceded that of popular animated figures like Felix the Cat and Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. As in so many other things in the world of cinema, Charlie Chaplin was inadvertently innovating here, too.
By the summer of 1915, the field of live Chaplin imitators was booming—so many were performing for pennies in public parks that some authorities took to holding Chaplin lookalike contests in the hope of somehow organising the situation. This lead to the longstanding myth that Chaplin himself entered such a contest, only to lose to someone else! That story can be traced back to claims by Mary Pickford reported in the press in the early-1920s. Chaplin himself never mentioned any such event, although comic actor Bob Hope is said to have won a Chaplin lookalike contest in 1915 in Cleveland. Beyond hopeful street entertainers, a spate of Chaplin imitators began appearing in their own movies, some of them later to be as famous as Chaplin under their own unique guises.
In March 1915 Essanay ran a trade advertisement warning off cinemas from screening imitation product: ‘Are you programming Charles Chaplin or a Deputy?’ asked the text. Whether these imitators were setting out to pay tribute to Chaplin’s uniqueness or whether they hoped to cash in by being mistaken for him is unclear at this distance in time. No doubt there was a mixture of motives involved: any runaway success, such as the 1915 ‘Chaplin Craze’ (as the newspapers took to calling it) always produces derivative works. A paper by Ulrich Ruedel for a Chaplin conference held by the BFI entitled ‘Send in the Clones’ noted that ‘Chaplin may indeed qualify as the most imitated character in film history.’ The plethora of ‘bogus Chaplin’ films released in the early days of his stardom would play merry havoc with later researchers attempts to construct a definitive filmography for the little Tramp.
As Glenn Mitchell pointed out in The Chaplin Encyclopedia, most of the Chaplin impersonators who suddenly appeared in Spring 1915 were cheerful amateurs not looking in any way to encroach upon his business. In fact, Chaplin and Essanay seem to have regarded such activities as not only a further indication of the phenomenal popularity of the clown but also as an effective form of free advertising for the films themselves. On stage, Stan Laurel—an old Karno colleague of Chaplin’s—was known to perform a pastiche of Chaplin in the days before his own film career took off. As Mitchell noted: ‘As Chaplin’s former understudy, Laurel had a reasonable entitlement to perform such an imitation.’ According to Chaplin biographer John McCabe, Laurel’s imitation was at least honest, being clearly promoted as such. Billed as ‘The Keystone Trio’ (pictured), Laurel appeared on stage during 1915 alongside Edgar and Wren Hurley, two more ex-Karno troupers who played versions of Mabel Normand and Chester Conklin. The act didn’t last too long, with Laurel disbanding The Keystone Trio in favour of the Stan Jefferson Trio (Jefferson being Laurel’s birth name). Chaplin was believed to have resented Laurel’s attempts (however short-lived) to cash in on his own success believing that if Laurel was to succeed he would need to develop his own character. This, of course, he would later do, but even then it was in partnership with Oliver Hardy after both had toiled alone and teamed with others in many silent movies.
Perhaps one of the most surprising Chaplin impersonators was Harold Lloyd. Working with Hal Roach, Lloyd developed a film character dubbed ‘Willie Work’ (later Lonesome Luke, pictured right) which according to Roach was ‘a definite imitation of Chaplin’. For his part, Lloyd claimed that film distributors were so keen to find the next Chaplin they refused to take on anyone who wasn’t Chaplin-like: ‘…exhibitors would hear of no departures from the Chaplin track,’ he claimed. Only a single ‘Willie Work’ short has survived, April 1915’s Just Nuts—it is in fact, Lloyd’s oldest surviving starring film. It is a standard romantic knockabout in the Keystone style, and Lloyd would go on to develop the Lonesome Luke character (where he adopted an opposite version of Chaplin’s look: tight trousers, baggy jacket, and liberally borrowed from Chaplin’s plots) and, finally, the ‘Glasses’ character which he would stick with through his successful silent career thereafter.
More troubling to Chaplin in years to come were those who took on a Chaplin-style persona for their own film characters. Perhaps the most notorious was Billy West, who’d come to the screen as a Chaplin impersonator a few years later in 1917. Born in 1892 in Russia as Roy B. Weissburg, he’d come to the United States as a child. He started life as a cartoonist, but made his first movie, Apartment #13, in 1912. He continued to perform comedy on stage, but it was the incredible popularity of Charlie Chaplin by 1917 that brought him pack to film as a pretty shameless Chaplin imitator. McCabe called what West perpetrated ‘theft of a sort quite obvious yet very hard to prove legally’.
What made West different from Laurel and some of the others imitating Chaplin on stage was the fact that Billy West was in direct competition with him in the field of movie comedy. West would directly steal Chaplin’s look and manner in around 50 individual films, many of which featured Oliver Hardy (pictured right, in his pre-Laurel and Hardy days, with West in The Hobo) as the ‘heavy’ as well as Chaplin’s one-time rep member Leo White. Charley Chase would also sometimes turn up in the movies, following his appearances opposite Chaplin during his year at Keystone. While he was no doubt making money from the venture, West was not well-regarded by the movie trade, with some of the industry newspapers printing his name in all lower case letters as if to diminish his importance.
No doubt in a side-swipe at Chaplin himself, West was billed as ‘The funniest man on Earth’, but his shorts were only ever knock-offs of the real thing in which his films directly imitated the plots and comic situations in many of Chaplin’s films some time after Chaplin had originated them. Adding injury to insult was a letter to Picture and Picturegoer magazine in 1919 which chided Chaplin for ‘always trying to imitate Billy West’! West would eventually abandon his imitation of Chaplin’s Tramp, but whether it was because he grew tired of it or because he felt he’d established his name in his own right is unclear. For his part, Chaplin never took legal action and retained that letter from the movie magazine ‘against the time he notices symptoms of acquiring a swelled head’.
There was another Billy who tasked Chaplin with his impersonations that the comic took more seriously and more personally. Billy Ritchie was a Scottish comedian born (as ‘William Hill’) in Glasgow in 1878 who’d been part of the Fred Karno vaudeville troupe almost a full decade before the likes of Charles Chaplin and Stan Laurel joined up. He was the original ‘drunk’ character in Karno’s famous ‘Mumming Birds’ sketch, and he claimed that the Chaplin Tramp costume originated there, so Charlie Chaplin was, in fact, imitating Billy Ritchie! In Hollywood, no doubt himself capitalising on the success of other Karno figures like Chaplin, Ritchie made a series of silent shorts with ex-Chaplin director Henry Lehrman’s L-KO Kompany outfit. Ritchie’s film costume was not an exact duplicate of Chaplin’s, with a frock coat and tighter trousers, as well as a broader moustache. However, his imitation was close enough to fool Swedish film censors who in 1915 believed that the newly-imported Chaplin movie The Rounders actually featured Billy Ritchie. Ritchie died in 1921 of stomach cancer, although his wife Winifred Ritchie was later employed by Chaplin as a wardrobe assistant. (Various authors, among them David Robinson and Glenn Mitchell, speculate about a possible family connection through Chaplin’s mother Hannah Hill and Billy Ritchie’s ‘William Hill’, making sense of Chaplin’s lack of legal action and subsequent employment of Winifred).
No doubt Laurel and Ritchie’s antics annoyed Chaplin, but only one film imitator led him to finally snap and sue: Mexican Charles Amador. So determined to pass himself off as ‘the Mexican Charlie Chaplin’, Amador legally changed his name to ‘Charles Aplin’. It may have been this alone that inspired Chaplin to sue. Amador’s lawyers cleverly—and accurately—argued that several other comedians on stage and on film had utilised various elements of a look and a costume that Chaplin was claiming was uniquely his long before he ever came on the scene. Chaplin, wisely, conceded all the precedents cited, but he argued that no single individual had used those elements combined in the way he did, and that this look in conjunction with his name—Charlie Chaplin—was his unique property. Citing the possibility of unfair competition and the need to protect his livelihood from imitators, Chaplin won his suit. For years afterwards, in private among friends, Chaplin would perform a routine in which he imitated his imitators in turn, pointing out the specifics that each of them had got wrong in performing the Charlie Chaplin Tramp character.
Trivia: In 1915 the Mark Hampton Company, manufacturers of Chaplin miniatures, launched a law suit against the Art Novelty Company, in an attempt to protect their $50,000 investment in the Chaplin craze.
The Contemporary View: ‘The one-and-only Charlie [Chaplin] is seen to his best advantage in this riotous farce which is as wildly funny as it is absurd. There seem to be no grey patches in his work. It is all one long scarlet scream.’—Bioscope, 20 May 1915
Slapstick: Romance in the park earns the Tramp a kick up the backside, while breaking up a fight sees him walk away with a string of sausages. His cane comes in handy for retrieving the pickpocket’s ill-gotten gains. The suitor, the Tramp, and the pickpocket get caught up in a chain of calamitous kicks, attracting the attention of the law. Punches soon turn to brick-throwing. Once everyone else is more of less knocked-out, the Tramp can get on with romancing the girl. The sudden appearance of a lake 90 seconds from the end leads to the inevitable soggy climax for several characters, but not the Tramp.
Verdict: Merely a walk in the park, better was soon to come, 2/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White, Lloyd Bacon, G. M. Anderson, Ben Turpin
Story: Responding to a sign declaring ‘Sparring partners wanted’, the Tramp enters the boxing ring…
Production: Charlie Chaplin’s ever increasing profile during 1915 saw him having to cope with a rather new experience: being required to give interviews as himself. Early on in this process he was simply trying to justify himself and his work, but later on he would come to see the press as a way of communicating his sometimes controversial view of the world and its woes. His position as a famous comedian across the United States (and eventually the world) gave him a platform which he could use to offer his views on politics and society: it would be a platform he would be only too happy to use, even when some of those views caused him huge amounts of trouble, leading to his eventual ‘exile’ from the US.
Chaplin took the opportunity of some of these early press interviews (many conducted during his weeks in Chicago shooting His New Job) to express worries about the expectations being placed upon him by his arrival at Essanay, especially in the light of the extravagant (to many) financial deal he’d been able to strike. ‘When a man’s been boosted to the skies, they’re apt to sit back in their seats and and say “I don’t see anything so wonderful about that chap. Nothing to make a fuss about. He’s over-rated”. But if a man’s not made, they take pride and joy in discovering him.’
According to Essanay’s studio co-chief, ‘Broncho’ Billy Anderson, it was he and not Chaplin who directed this third Essanay outing, The Champion. According to Joyce Milton’s biography of Chaplin, The Tramp, the pair swapped assignments while waiting for the new Essanay film developing lab to be set up. According to Anderson, Chaplin directed one of Anderson’s western shorts, while Anderson helmed one of Chaplin’s comedies. Anderson claimed that he filmed Chaplin as ‘a skinny prize-fighter… I had him put a horseshoe in his glove. He could hardly lift it, and then he swung at the fellow and hit himself with the horseshoe and down he went.’
There are some problems with this story. While Anderson appears in the film—he can be seen as a rather over-enthusiastic audience member during the boxing match (Ben Turpin makes his blink-and-you’ll miss it appearance in these scenes as a ringside vendor)—it seems unlikely that Chaplin would give over his hard-won right to direct his own material so soon into his Essanay run, even to the man who ran the studio in Niles, California. Chaplin certainly appears uncredited in Anderson’s short His Regeneration, so perhaps the deal was simply to appear in each other’s films, not to direct them, and Anderson was confused or later exaggerated the story. The question of who was behind the camera is important, as The Champion would turn out to be a rather significant film in the overall development of the character of the Tramp.
For his first few efforts at Essanay Chaplin seemed happy to fall back on old work, either from his time at Keystone or from his years in vaudeville amid the Fred Karno troupe. While he got to grips with working at Essanay and considered ways to develop his Tramp character successfully, Chaplin simply began by producing better versions of stories he’d done before. So it was with The Champion, the roots of which go all the way back to an old Karno music hall sketch ‘The Football Match’—in particular, the scene in which Leo White (overacting in the dated Victorian style that Chaplin himself eschewed) attempts to bribe the Tramp to throw the boxing match. Even the climatic fight owed something to another Karno favourite, ‘The Yap Yaps’.
However, more than anything, The Champion draws upon the Chaplin/Arbuckle Keystone short The Knockout in which he’d appeared in just one scene as a referee. The direction of that scene, by Charles Avery, in which Chaplin is drawn into the boxing match featuring Roscoe ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle had resulted in a simple, single long shot with a locked-off camera. Chaplin knew he could improve on that, and he took the opportunity of his first few weeks at Essanay to give it a go. As Chaplin biographer David Robinson said of The Champion ‘Like other Essanay films, this seems a deliberate effort to retrieve opportunities lost at Keystone’. It was also Chaplin indulging in his personal interests, as by this time he’d become an even bigger fan of boxing often attending local prize fights with friends and members of the Essanay studio staff (the sport was still illegal in many states, so film of real matches or even comic spoofs of the same were often crowd pleasers).
There’s no doubt in this film that Chaplin’s Tramp character is just that, a vagrant living on the streets (as indicated in the opening caption). He’s not only got himself to look after though, he’s also got a trusty pet dog to care for (a scene that lays the foundation for the later classic, A Dog’s Life [1918]). The dog used here, known as Spike the Bulldog, was unfortunately struck by a car and killed mere weeks after completing this film. This was a tentative step in giving the Tramp character an emotional investment in someone or something other than himself. It starts with a dog, but would expand in later films to take in Edna Purviance as a regular love interest character and, eventually, Jackie Coogan as the titular character of The Kid in 1921.
Chancing his arm as a fighter to make some cash (if only to keep he and his dog in sausages), the Tramp is soon in the ring, having enhanced his prospects of success by stuffing a horseshoe into his glove. The final sequence of the film, running at a full six minutes, was Chaplin’s chance to make-up for the directorial failure of The Knockout. He could clearly see the potential for such a fight scenario for cinematic laughs, as he’d choreographed his turn as a referee accordingly, only for Avery to fail to capture the action properly. Now, on The Champion, Chaplin would get to do it his way. Often such sequences are spoken of in terms of choreography—and while Chaplin worked out each and every move with his partners in detail, it is a particularly apt word here as the sequence culminates in the sparring partners almost indulging in a fox trot.
Featuring in The Champion was Lloyd Bacon, another new arrival in what was rapidly becoming Chaplin’s own rep company. Born in California in 1889, Bacon had learned the clowning trade in vaudeville, just as Chaplin had. Also like Chaplin, Bacon’s parents had been involved in show business. His earliest work (starting in 1914, the same year as Chaplin’s debut) was with Billy Anderson in his western shorts and then supporting Chaplin in a variety of Essanay films. Like several of Chaplin’s Essanay stock company, Bacon would follow the comedian when he switched to work at Mutual in 1916, with Easy Street (1917) being his final work with Chaplin.
After serving in the military during the First World War, Bacon returned to film work at Triangle in 1919, becoming a director in the early 1920s, working with Mack Sennett among others. The early 1930s saw him handling big stars in the making in dramatic subjects, such as Joan Blondell in Miss Pinkerton (1932) and James Cagney in The Picture Snatcher (1933). Musicals became a Bacon speciality, including 42nd Street (1933), Footlight Parade (1933), and Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936). He’d later direct Humphrey Bogart, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson and Cagney again in a series of late-1930s gangster pictures. He died in 1955, aged 65.
While their off-screen romance was blossoming, The Champion would be the first time Chaplin and leading lady Edna Purviance (as the trainer’s daughter) would kiss on screen—or almost. Chaplin’s Tramp suffers a bout of sudden shyness, almost as if he was aware of the watching audience (indicated by his uncharacteristic look to camera—something that Oliver Hardy would later perfect), and he holds up a beer jug behind which the kiss takes place, out of the sight of prying eyes. Otherwise, Purviance doesn’t have much to do in this short.
The character of the Tramp was subtly evolving during these first Essanay films: he not only has someone else to look after (his dog, with whom he shares his meagre food, an act that would have been uncharacteristic of the Keystone Tramp), he’s also developing romantic feelings that compare starkly with the more lustful pursuit of women in parks indulged in by his Keystone predecessor. Chaplin had discovered that he could both make his Tramp more likeable, by softening his character, and at the same time heighten the comedy of his films. Mere slapstick—while still an important element—would not dominate in the way it had when he was making films for Mack Sennett.
The Champion offers to the observant viewer a glimpse behind-the-scenes of the Essanay studio lot at Niles. The fence against which much of the training action is staged is actually the perimeter fence of the studio itself. It’s also possible throughout the film to spot shots of Essanay’s glass roofed studio stage (briefly, through a gate), the open countryside surrounding the studio, and the studio’s row of bungalows (within which Chaplin lived his first few weeks back in California) where the Tramp encounters the cop.
In Chaplin: The Tramp’s Odyssey Simon Louvish called Essanay ‘the workshop in which the Tramp, like Geppetto’s Pinocchio, is hammered out and let loose from his strings.’ Chaplin drew upon his own childhood memories and the recent experience his three years in America had brought him to develop the Tramp further. Where the Keystone figure had been a one-dimensional force of nature, often a thoughtlessly destructive force, the new Essanay Tramp was an aspiring American, a figure who only needed that one opportunity to set him on the road to prosperity. The new Tramp was more optimistic, forward-looking, and selfless, making for a far more sympathetic figure with whom worldwide audiences could eventually identify.
By this point in his filmmaking, Chaplin wasn’t simply playing imaginary characters and situation but was sourcing his comedy in real life people and events, which he would study. ‘I know now why my comedy is good,’ Chaplin told Motion Picture magazine in March 1915. ‘I lay out my plot and study my character thoroughly. I even follow the character I am to represent for miles or sit to watch him at his work before I portray him. It is a serious study to learn characters, it is a hard study. But to make comedy a success there must be an ease, a spontaneity in the acting that cannot be associated with seriousness.’
Slapstick: Starting out as a punching bag, the Tramp is on the ropes before he learns the ropes. Aided by his horseshoe-stuffed glove, the Tramp knocks out the champ. An encounter with a policeman leaves the copper punch drunk. Training proves both injurious and intoxicating (that jug of beer helps). When swinging on the ropes, Chaplin’s Tramp shows some of the balletic poise that would come to define the character. The choreography of the climatic fight itself is a joy, with Chaplin making the most of his lithe form (in comparison with his chunkier opponent, Bud Jamison). Staged like a dance, the Tramp ducks every blow aimed his way, until he’s finally floored. The second half sees his punches make contact—although it is more often with the referee and his own face. Clinging onto his opponent as if he were a dance partner, the pair whirl around the ring until they separate and take turns knocking each other to the floor. Expected to throw the fight, the Tramp triumphs with a last-minute burst of energy, pursuing his opponent around the ring. Victory is finally sealed with a little illicit help from the Tramp’s faithful canine chum, who bites the Tramp’s opponent on the bum.
Trivia: The Champion was the last Chaplin film Ben Turpin appeared in. Part of the reason may have been down to the $50-per-week Turpin discovering that the less experienced Chaplin was being paid $1,250-per-week.
The Contemporary View: ‘For some time past rumours have been in circulation to the effect that Charlie Chaplin, the famous Essanay comedian, who is at the present time the best drawing card of all motion picture actors, had been killed while playing in one of his comedies. This report was emphatically discredited. Charlie is very much alive at the present time, producing side-splitting, multiple-reel films. Had the rumour of his death been true, not only the Essanay company, but ten million or more people who spend several hours in picture-play theatres throughout the country would have sorely felt the loss.’—Picture-Play Weekly, April 1915
Verdict: Hits home, with every punch reaching its target—the funny bone, 3/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Ben Turpin, Edna Purviance, Bud Jamison, Leo White
Story: Two swells (Chaplin, Turpin) on the town meet their matches…
Production: Charlie Chaplin didn’t like his new working environment at Essanay’s Chicago studios. Ironically, he’d chosen to work there for his Essanay debut, His New Job, as he didn’t much fancy their limited facility at Niles, 60 miles outside San Francisco either. However, the cold climate, windy weather and factory-like working environment was not conducive to Chaplin’s evolving art. George Spoor—the ‘S’ of Essanay—was still suspicious of Chaplin’s actual worth and for his part, Chaplin wasn’t happy working under his supervision. Max Anderson—the ‘A’ of Essanay—had returned to the company’s Niles facility after showing Chaplin around in Chicago to resume work on his on-going Broncho Billy series of westerns. Chaplin decided to join him and having completed work on His New Job on 12 January 1915, he had returned to California by 18 January. He felt working under Anderson’s supervision would be a better bet, as Anderson was at least a filmmaker, while Spoor was much too like the New York money men who effectively ran the new Hollywood studios from their East coast outposts.
Niles is a small town, but even today it boasts proudly of its connections to Charlie Chaplin. There’s a Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum (http://www.nilesfilmmuseum.org/) paying tribute to the community’s filmmaking past, as well as small stores selling Chaplin merchandise and many cashing in on the town’s century-old cinematic legacy. Formed around a notable railroad junction, Niles is located east of San Francisco, south of Oakland and north of San Jose within the city of Fremont. The studio lot sat at the western entrance to Niles Canyon, the location for many of the Broncho Billy movies. The studio lot itself was essentially a fallow field upon which had been constructed a giant barn-like studio building. The glass roof ensured plenty of light, but it also caused those working on movies to have to toil under stuffy and hot conditions. Upon arrival, Chaplin moved into a room in a bungalow—one of a row that featured as background for street scenes in the movies—on the studio lot that he initially shared with Anderson. The accommodation was primitive, especially for men who were making a substantial income, but Chaplin had lived in far worse conditions during his childhood in London. Anderson mainly lived in a studio financed suite in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, only staying at Niles when he absolutely had to. Chaplin quickly paid a visit to the city, bought a violin and proceeded to practice for several hours each day. His colleagues at the studio were relieved when the new signing finally moved into a room in Niles’ one and only hotel.
Chaplin now had three weeks to make each of his two-reel shorts, rather than the single week he’d been allocated at Keystone. Chaplin was intent on expanding his scope. In an early interview promoting his arrival as Essanay’s newest star, Chaplin had ruminated: ‘I have a distinct theory regarding farces… I believe that a plot which could easily become a dramatic subject, but which is treated in an amusing manner and which burlesques events of daily life … is the one way to make successful farce comedy. I hope my releases under the Essanay banner will be as agreeable as my past work…’ Chaplin would subtly expand his comedy, building in more drama and telling more rounded stories with proper conclusions over his next few films, with A Jitney Elopement (1915) the first to really show a new direction. By the time of The Tramp (1915), he’d be introducing more pathos into the character he played, thereafter making it integral to his films.
Chaplin’s biggest challenge after re-locating to California once again was to find a new leading lady as his co-star, someone who could fill Mabel Normand’s shoes without bringing the difficulties he’d experienced working with her. An advert was placed in the San Francisco Chronicle: ‘Wanted: The prettiest girl in California to take part in a moving picture.’ Auditions were held at the Belvoir Hotel in Niles, where several applicants were screen tested, among them Edna Purviance.
Or perhaps she was discovered by Chaplin and Anderson, who were in San Francisco while the cafe set was under construction for A Night Out, searching for a potential leading lady. Purviance was recommended to the pair, and an interview conducted at the St. Francis Hotel by Union Square. Except, maybe she was discovered when a cowboy bit part actor playing in a Broncho Billy short at the Essanay studio recalled a blonde secretary who wanted to be an actress and put her in touch with Chaplin. Or did Chaplin meet her at a reception in Los Angeles in 1914 (a photo of the Keystone crowd and Purviance in Chaplin’s own ‘My Life in Pictures’ is dated 1914) and kept her in mind for a possible future film role? All these stories, and no doubt several others, have seen print over the years as explanation of how then 19-year-old Edna Purviance came to work with Charlie Chaplin at Essanay.
Chaplin himself told the story of the accidental discovery in San Francisco, while for her part Purviance (left) claimed to have responded to the newspaper advertisement. Hundreds of girls had turned out for the audition, putting the young woman off making the attempt, so instead she visited with an acquaintance who worked at the studio instead. According to her account, she was spotted by Chaplin, who firmly pointed in her direction and exclaimed ‘That’s the type I want!’ Purviance didn’t recognise Chaplin as he was out of costume and make-up, dressed in his very different civilian guise. Chaplin asked her to co-star in his next picture, to which she claimed to have replied: ‘Why not? I’ll try anything once!’
Puirviance had been born in Nevada in 1895, where her parents had owned a hotel. She attended business college in San Francisco, and was working as a secretary in 1915 when Charlie Chaplin ‘discovered’ her. She had taken part in amateur dramatic productions in her mid-teens, but supposedly harboured no real ambitions to become an actress. This suited Chaplin fine as he, according to cameraman Rollie Tothero (quoted in Peter Ackroyd’s Charlie Chaplin) wanted an untested actress who ‘didn’t know her arse from her elbow’. That way, Chaplin could mould exactly the performance he wanted. Purviance was so successful in the role that she appeared in each of Chaplin’s subsequent films (except for One A.M.) through until 1923— an eight year period.
‘I had thought of myself as gifted,’ recalled Purviance in 1916, ‘with a little more than ordinary intelligence. After the first day in front of the camera [in A Night Out], I came to the conclusion that I was the biggest boob on Earth. Charlie was very patient with me, and after my first picture—in which I was terrible—I began to get used to the work, and although I have had occasional relapses, I am at least “camera wise” by now…’
Purviance would prove to be a good foil for Chaplin, her blonde hair contrasting nicely with his darker features, her natural on-screen warmth making up for his sometimes frosty character. She served to suggest to Chaplin that he could humanise the Tramp even more, make the audience have more sympathy for him and his plight, rather than indulging in the nonsense knockabout comedy that had been the forte of the Mack Sennett Keystone crowd. It wasn’t long before their on-screen chemistry spilled over into an off-screen real life affair. She was soon living in a hotel not far from Chaplin, and the pair generally dined together every evening. Out-takes from some of the movies made during this period seem to show a spontaneous fun-loving girl, quite distinct from the more mannered character that she would ‘perform’ on screen. Perhaps that’s exactly what Chaplin needed to ground him at this point in his increasingly tumultuous life.
William ‘Bud’ Jamison (right) plays the head waiter and jealous husband of Edna Purviance’s character in A Night Out. This would be the first of a series of appearances for the 6ft tall California-born vaudeville veteran in various Chaplin shorts. Previously he’d appeared in some of Harold Lloyd’s Lonesome Luke comedies (the part he played before perfecting his ‘glasses’ character) and in some early solo Stan Laurel comedies, before the latter’s teaming with Oliver Hardy by Hal Roach. Later in his career he’d work with the likes of the Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon and Charley Chase in Columbia’s sound shorts. He died in 1944.
For the film Chaplin revived his well-worn drunk act from his British vaudeville days on the stage, putting himself and Ben Turpin (in his final major appearance with Chaplin) in a version of the vaudeville staple ‘The Funny Drunks’ in what essentially a remake of The Rounders, his Keystone movie with Rosco ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle. According to Ackroyd’s Chaplin biography, so convincing were the pair during filming at the Hotel Oakland in Oakland, California that they were almost arrested for being intoxicated in public. Oddly, it might have been supposed that Chaplin’s fame across America at this point would have tipped off even the dimmest cop as to what was actually going on, making the entire tale somewhat suspect.
After a weekend in San Francisco following the shooting of the film, Chaplin returned to the studio only to discover that in his absence Anderson had begun editing the short by cutting up the actual camera negative. Chaplin was furious, tearing a strip off both Anderson and the cameraman involved in the editing, Rollie Totheroh. Chaplin wanted to cut on film, so that he could experiment with putting his shorts together: cutting the negative destroyed the original material from which he hoped to hone a precise piece of closely considered comedy. As a result of Chaplin’s complaint the studio had to install new equipment so they could develop their film on site. The incident was unfortunate, but it served two purposes. It established Chaplin’s preferred way of working early on, and brought those at Essanay’s Niles facility into line with his way of thinking, which helped improve his films. Almost as importantly, the incident led to Chaplin striking up a great personal and professional relationship with Totheroh, who would serve as Chaplin’s principal cameraman for almost the next four decades.
Roland H. Totheroh, known to all as ‘Rollie’, had been born in 1890 in San Francisco and was a former cartoonist and minor league ball player before working in cinematography at Essanay before Chaplin’s arrival. Totheroh recalled the crew’s reaction to Chaplin’s arrival, surprised to discover he was English: ‘We all thought he was a little Frenchman!’ Totheroh was once credited as being the principal cameraman on Chaplin’s Essanay shorts, but later research has suggested it was more likely that Totheroh functioned as an assistant to cinematographer Harry Ensign during this period. Totheroh, as a result of the relationship he built with Chaplin during 1915, went with the comedian when he moved on to Mutual in 1916, and worked with him right up until his death (in 1967) with his final credit being ‘photographic consultant’ on Limelight (1952).
There is much for film buffs and Chaplin enthusiasts to be grateful to Totheroh (pictured left, behind Chaplin) for. Throughout Chaplin’s career from this point onwards, Totheroh functioned as an ad-hoc Chaplin archivist and film conserver. When few people were giving any thought to film preservation beyond the short term aim of making money through nickelodeon distribution, Totheroh (perhaps as a result of his close proximity to Chaplin) viewed their work together as a form of art, worth preserving. It was actually contrary to Chaplin’s direct instructions that Totheroh kept all the out-takes from the films that the filmmaker himself initially wanted destroyed. It has been suggested that the initial impetus for this came from Totheroh’s cautious nature, with him maintaining the material as safety copies in case the original negative should ever get damaged. Totheroh’s foresight allowed the much later creation of the fascinating Kevin Brownlow three-part documentary television series Unknown Chaplin (1983) which drew heavily upon the out-takes and other material Totheroh kept safe.
In A Night Out, two drunks (Chaplin, Turpin) out on the town fall foul of a ‘French count’ (Leo White), only to encounter him once more in a restaurant, where their drunken harassment sees them ejected by a out-sized waiter (Jamison, almost in Eric Campbell mode, Chaplin’s foil in many of the Mutual comedies). The Tramp lights upon a pretty girl (Purviance) whom he tries to seduce, before discovering she’s married to the hostile waiter. He quickly moves to another hotel to escape him, but unfortunately the harassed couple plan the exact same move. The climax is a hotel room mix-up straight out of Mabel’s Strange Predicament or Caught in the Rain from the previous year.
There’s little that’s new here, over and above the Keystone versions of the same basic material, but the execution under Chaplin’s ever-more sure hand is somewhat better than his work in the previous year. Despite their personal animosity and falling out over the best method of constructing cinematic comedy, Turpin and Chaplin make a good team in A Night Out, but they don’t reach the thwarted heights once promised by Chaplin’s teaming with Arbuckle in The Rounders. In many ways, Turpin’s comic shtick is too close to Chaplin’s own to provide the kind of contrast that Arbuckle’s bulkier figure offered. However, they do spark off one another well in a near-perfect cinematic resurrection of that old vaudeville drunk routine. ‘I have since proved that I could work without him,’ Turpin would later say of his time after Chaplin. ‘I am now a star and my films make a lot of money.’ Despite his increasing fame and wealth, it seems that Chaplin was neither interested in becoming a ‘star’ per se, nor was he particularly interested in money. The challenges of creating unique and captivating film comedy were his driving force, not fame and fortune: in fact he’d find both of those things, when they were thrust upon him during 1915, to be largely troubling.
Trivia: In press interviews given upon his arrival at Essanay, Chaplin claimed his ‘highly cultivated’ mother was dead: this wasn’t true, Hannah Chaplin was resident at Peckham House hospital before moving to the Cane Hill asylum. Chaplin and his half-brother Syd were paying for her care.
The Contemporary View: ‘The film gives Chaplin full elbow room for many extraordinary antics and touches of humorous detail, and the fun romps along at top speed … Turpin makes an excellent partner, and takes many a stunning knockout blow with paralytic indifference.’—The Cinema (1915).
Slapstick: Even before anyone’s had a drink, the encounter with the ‘French count’ gets physical. Some hat trouble serves to re-acquaint them in the posh hotel. Soon Turpin’s taking a tumble (or two). The prominent fountain proves to be a well of slapstick nonsense, including the Tramps ablutions. When Turpin is tossed out, the Tramp gets familiar with the count’s lady friend. The Tramp’s cane comes in handy for retrieving his pal from the curious cop. The Tramp finds walking a drag, so Turpin lends a hand (or two). Keyhole peeping gets the Tramp’s pants wet (there’s a soda syphon involved). An unexpected reunion with the hotel’s waiter prompts a change of residence for the Tramp, although signing the register proves something of a challenge. The two pals reunion in the park quickly turns into a punch up (and a classic Keystone-style brick gag) over the room rent. The cane is anthropomorphised even more than ever before when the Tramp tucks it in for the night (one of this short’s best bits). Apparently candlestick phones don’t dispense water, nor do they make for good clothes hangers. A canine calamity brings things to a chaotic climax.
Verdict: A mash-up of some old Keystone favourites, it is clear that Chaplin is still searching for a unique signature, 2/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
With: Ben Turpin, Charlotte Mineau, Leo White, Agnes Ayres, Gloria Swanson, Jesse Robins
Story: Hired by ‘Lockstone’ film studios, the Tramp experiences life behind-the-scenes and as a featured extra, causing havoc wherever he goes…
Production: Charlie Chaplin set out on his second year of making motion pictures a somewhat changed man from the neophyte who’d arrived at the doors of Mack Sennett’s Keystone studios in December 1913. He’d gone from hired clown to creator of his own material, from a stage-trained vaudevillian who knew nothing about making films to the most accomplished director on the Keystone lot. All those around him, towards the end of 1914, knew that Keystone’s simple formulas could no longer contain Chaplin’s growing talent. In order to further develop his art and craft in motion picture comedies, Chaplin knew he’d have to look elsewhere.
He’d become such a success with American audiences during the second half of 1914 that Chaplin was the subject of a minor bidding war among rival studios. He wasn’t prepared to jump at the first nor the most lucrative offer: control was all to Chaplin. Any deal he made had to guarantee him full control over his own films, the kind of right that had been hard-won during his year at Keystone, chaffing under the restrictions imposed upon his filmmakers by Mack Sennett.
The winners of Chaplin’s services for 1915 were the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company of Chicago. The studio name came from the founders, ‘S’ for George Spoor and ‘A’ for Gilbert M. Anderson (born ‘Max Aronson’). Both were film industry pioneers, with Spoor working in exhibition and distribution while Anderson was better known to audiences as ‘Broncho Billy’, the first major cowboy film star. Anderson, more than Spoor, understood the creative nature of filmmaking and was prepared to offer Chaplin $1250 per week with a $10,000 signing on bonus.
Much more important was the freedom Anderson promised: no longer would Chaplin be held to the rigid deadlines that applied at Keystone, where each short film was just another in a long Henry Ford-style manufacturing chain, pumped out to keep cinema audiences briefly amused. Instead, Essanay were offering Chaplin larger budgets, more time, and the freedom to explore the still developing art of cinema comedy at his own pace. Despite his obvious popularity at Keystone, Spoor had his doubts that Chaplin was worth the money the studio was offering, but he agreed to be guided by Anderson.
Chaplin preferred the Essanay set-up at Chicago over their Californian base just outside San Francisco, so at the turn of the year the young comedian (he was still only 25-years-old) made his way to the cold East. One of the first challenges Chaplin faced in Chicago was recreating his now world-famous Tramp costume: the original had been left behind at Keystone. The new-look Tramp outfit was put together with items that Chaplin simply bought ‘off-the-shelf’ in various Chicago stores. He went up and down State Street, obtaining the baggy trousers and tight jacket he needed. His biggest problem, however, was in finding just the right pair of outsized shoes to compliment his distinctive waddling walk. With the costume recreated, Chaplin was ready to begin the next phase of his filmmaking life. Despite the initial thrill of coming to work at Essanay on his enlarged salary, Charlie Chaplin was to find that life at the new company wasn’t going to be as smooth as he’d hoped.
The story goes that Charlie Chaplin broke the ice with his new studio colleagues in Chicago by performing an outlandish clog dance in his full Tramp regalia, recalling his days as one of the Lancashire Lads. Once advanced orders from cinema distributors for the first Chaplin film from Essanay crossed the 100 mark, even George Spoor was more accommodating to his studio’s new star name. He paid for a series of full page ads which appeared on 16 January 1915 in Motion Picture News and Motion Picture World boasting of the studio’s newest player: the world’s ‘greatest’ and ‘funniest’ comedian was now with Essanay, and the studio wanted the movie world to know about it. Less than two weeks later, similar ads ran in the British movie press, such as Bioscope magazine, dubbing Chaplin ‘The greatest motion picture comedian the world has ever seen’! However, Essanay were not used to working Chaplin-style: the studio shut up shop every night at 6pm sharp, regardless of what was shooting, regularly screened film rushes in negative format to save the cost of developing, and—even worse from Chaplin’s point-of-view—performers were issued their scripts from the ‘scenario department’ (then run by future movie gossip columnist Louella Parsons).
Chaplin, of course, was having none of it. His first film for the new management was autobiographically inspired—and it would be the only film he’d make in Chicago, a town he found more than lived up to its billing as the ‘Windy City’. Cheekily entitled His New Job, it is set in a familiar-looking movie studio called ‘Lockstone’. Chaplin’s Tramp is a stagehand, helping out with the props behind the scenes, when he unexpectedly finds himself promoted to be an on-screen player in the absence of the movie’s true star. Admittedly, this first Essanay film is not a great advance upon the work Chaplin was doing during his final few months at Keystone, but it does contain a few pointers to his future direction and introduced a new series of collaborators he’d be working with over the coming year.
Prime among them was Ben Turpin. Born in 1869, the famously cross-eyed comedian had been with Essanay since shortly after its inception in 1907. Turpin was a seat-of-the pants comedian who had no time for Chaplin’s more consider, formal approach to devising his comedy business. Shaped in the crucible of American vaudeville, circus and even burlesque (where he’d provide the largely-ignored comedy in between the strippers), Turpin was the recipient of what was believed to be the first pie-in-the-face gag in the 1909 Essanay short Mr Flip. By 1912, his distinctive look (he had his unique eyes insured by Lloyds of London for $25,000, believing them to not only be his trademark but also key to his comedic livelihood) was well-known and he was a recognised film comedy star.
With the arrival of Chaplin, however, Turpin found himself demoted to the role of ‘second banana’ (essentially filling the role played by Chester Conklin in many of the Keystone shorts), something he was less than pleased about. Perhaps if Chaplin had stuck it out in Chicago a bit longer, the duo may have been forced to get on, but with his early departure back to the West coast after His New Job, his work with Turpin was curtailed (comprising the first two Essanay films, His New Job and A Night Out, a tiny role in The Champion and an appearance in the new scenes Essanay would add to Chaplin’s Burlesque on Carmen to fill it out to featurette length). In a strange kind of job swap, Turpin would later go on to become a star at the Mack Sennett studio for the next decade or so. One of Turpin’s final film appearances was alongside Laurel and Hardy in Saps at Sea (1940), one of their early features. Turpin, who’d enjoyed great wealth since his retirement from the screen due to his careful real estate investments, died in 1940, aged 70.
Also appearing in His New Job was Leo White, a fellow Brit born in Manchester in 1882. He’d performed on the music hall stage across Britain before making the journey to America in about 1910 where he made something of a name for himself in the ‘Sweedie’ film comedies with Wallace Beery (who dragged up as a strange, supposedly Swedish maid) from 1914. Unlike Turpin, White would remain part of Chaplin’s evolving stock company of supporting acts right through to his time at Mutual studios and even as late as The Great Dictator (1940). In His New Job, White first appears more or less as himself at the studio reception before putting on his ‘comedy character’ costume, a kind of dandified cod-European nobleman which he’d most often play in Chaplin’s films. He’ll turn up regularly throughout Chaplin’s time at Essanay.
Perhaps easy to miss in His New Job, as she was uncredited and right at the back of the opening scene, was an appearance of actress Gloria Swanson, more associated with melodrama than silent comedy. Perhaps best known for her role as Norma Desmond, the bitter former silent movie star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), it is sometimes forgotten that Swanson was actually a genuine silent comedy performer, even before she became the muse of director Cecil B. DeMille. Born in Chicago in 1899, Swanson was an army brat who started in movies as an extra at Essanay in 1914, the same year Chaplin was learning the movie ropes at Keystone. She attempted to win the leading female role in His New Job (played by Charlotte Mineau), but Chaplin just didn’t see her in the part (he was looking for a new Mabel Normand type, and eventually found Edna Purviance) casting her instead in the minor role of the uncredited stenographer. She recalled of Chaplin in Chicago that he ‘kept laughing and making his eyes twinkle, and talking in a light, gentle voice, encouraging me to let myself go and be silly.’ The following year she’d be in California working for ‘king of comedy’ Mack Sennett, before becoming a genuine star in her own right in a series of De Mille movies, including Male and Female (1919) and Why Change your Wife? (1920, in which she performed opposite a real lion). In addition, she became something of a fashion icon, defining the look of 1920s Hollywood in the eyes of many movie fans. Ironically, Swanson would imitate Chaplin on screen twice, in Manhandled (1924) and Sunset Boulevard (which, of course, also featured Buster Keaton—Chaplin’s rival and Limelight co-star—as her long-suffering butler). Much later, she would also narrated the Chaplin documentary The Eternal Tramp (1970).
Charlotte Mineau, playing the role Swanson wanted, would become one of Chaplin’s regular supporting cast at Essanay and Mutual, appearing in his movies through to 1917’s Easy Street. She’d been in a Sweedie film (Sweedie Goes to College, 1915) opposite Turpin and Swanson, and ended her career with the Marx Brothers in Monkey Business (1931). Following her retirement from the screen in 1932, she lived to the grand old age of 93, dying in 1979.
Perhaps Chaplin needed to do something easy, given the unfamiliar surroundings and people he was now working with, for his debut film at Essanay. His New Job was both a good joke on his actual circumstances and provided a ready-made backdrop as it was set in a film studio. There’s no great change in Chaplin’s character here, either. He didn’t take the fresh start as an opportunity to reinvent the Tramp, not yet at least. Instead, Chaplin seemed content simply to reproduce all those elements that had made him such a success in the previous year, possibly being afraid to change too much, too soon. He’s physically violent, causing mayhem and chaos wherever he goes around the studio, amused by his own unerring ability to disrupt the work in progress. This is the Tramp as malevolent imp, using whatever objects come to hand to further his aim of causing trouble, whether its a soda syphon, a saw, or a scenic pillar. The movie was put together in just two weeks, not quite Keystone pace but pretty quick nonetheless.
Drawing upon previous Keystone work, most obviously A Film Johnnie and The Masquerader, Chaplin takes the opportunity of His New Job to not only comment upon his own new employment but also upon the madness of filmmaking itself, at a time when the art form was in its relative infancy (he’d do it yet again in 1916’s Behind the Screen). While there is little new here, in terms of comedic content, there is a slight advance in style. At Keystone, such was the breakneck pace of production that a ‘point-and-shoot’ aesthetic was all that could be managed: the camera rarely moved, if ever, and everything was shot in a four-square, locked off fashion. In some sections of His New Job, the camera tracks (ever so slightly) along with the action, suggesting that Chaplin was either pushing himself to experiment or had picked up the idea from someone at Essanay, perhaps his photographer on this short, Jackson Rose. Either way, it was a sign of things to come, with Chaplin increasingly experimenting with form and content as the year progressed, deepening and developing the character of the Tramp far beyond what had been possible at Keystone.
Within just six months of his arrival as Essanay’s newest star, Charlie Chaplin would not just be well known in America but would be well on his way to becoming a world famous figure… and he was only getting started.
Trivia: This is the first time Chaplin actually receives on-screen credit—’Featuring Charlie Chaplin’.
The Contemporary View: ‘It is absolutely necessary to laugh at Chaplin in ten-ninths of his antics in this disaster-attended search for a new job—the small point in which is evidenced the only irony in the picture.’—Chicago Tribune (1915).
Slapstick: From the first moment, when Charlie cosies up to the girl also waiting for an audition, we recognise this is the Tramp we’ve known from Keystone. Especially when he immediately walks into a door. Charlie’s first meeting with Ben Turpin is all about personal space issues, and the Tramp’s cane comes in rather handy. The pair’s troubles continue either side of that pesky door. Soon Charlie’s crashing about the studio causing havoc, interrupting takes and is demoted from extra to carpenter. He’s soon back in the picture, though when the Sennett-like director fires an actor. Naturally, the dressing room provides plenty of opportunity for horsing around… Gambling proves to be a costly distraction. Soon, Charlie’s making his point… with a prop sword. He then takes a saw and a hammer to poor old Ben Turpin. The sword proves troublesome once more during repeated takes. A cigarette promises sophistication until Charlie topples a pillar like a celluloid Samson. A rumble with the rotund director, a stramash with the star, and a final battering for Ben wrap the show.
Verdict: Slow but steady start to Chaplin’s new era, 2/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
Duration: 74 mins (six reels)/85 mins (2003 restoration)
With: Marie Dressler, Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, The Keystone Kops, Charles Bennett, Charley Chase
Story: World-weary city man (Chaplin) meets fresh, innocent country girl (Dressler), and plots to get his hands on her father’s fortune…
Production: Widely regarded as the first proper ‘feature length’ comedy film made in Hollywood, Tillie’s Puncture Romance was created by Mack Sennett as a vehicle for stage actress Marie Dressler. If she’s recalled at all these days, it is more likely to be for her acerbic role in the brilliant Dinner at Eight (1933), co-starring Jean Harlow. Before 1914, the Canadian-born Dressler was a theatre and vaudeville veteran taking her first steps in the new-fangled world of movies. That Sennett built his film around the mis-cast Dressler and not his newest native movie star Charlie Chaplin betrays something of the projects lengthy and tortured gestation.
Sennett’s Keystone was only two years old when he embarked upon his first feature film production, inspired by news that his one-time mentor D.W. Griffith was working on a similarly lengthy project then called ‘The Clansman’ (later released as Birth of a Nation). Sennett employed most of his regular Keystone players in roles in the film, with Chaplin and Mabel Normand at the top of the list. The film, was, however, expressly designed to launch the then 44-year-old Dressler as a movie star. Sennett called her ‘a star whose name and face meant something to every possible theatre-goer in the United States and the British Empire.’ The project started shooting in April 1914, before Chaplin’s astonishing star status was fully established. Sennett feared that his regular Keystone performers, even Normand, would not automatically command theatre bookings, so he was relying on Dressler as a ‘known name’ to attract an audience. By the time the film was released at the very end of 1914, the audience were coming for Chaplin not to see some stage actress, although—as we’ll see—Chaplin wasn’t exactly playing his Tramp character.
Sennett secured Dressler for the film on a twelve week contract, paying her $2,500 per week. The film was based upon the musical play Tillie’s Nightmare by Edgar Smith with which Dressler had enjoyed some success on stage in 1910 (and she’d revive the production in 1920). Filming filled 45 working days across eight weeks, and the production had wrapped by June. All the while, the Sennett crew were continuing to produce their regular shorts. Sennett recalled: ‘I had to continue the steady flow of short comedies each week. This meant that I never had my Tillie cast all working together on any given day. One or two of them were constantly out of the picture acting in a two reeler.’
The film had a budget of $50,000, well in excess of the cost of six single-reelers. In fact, while Tillie’s Punctured Romance was in production Chaplin featured in no less than five other shorts: The Fatal Mallet, The Knockout, Her Friend the Bandit, Mabel’s Busy Day, and Mabel’s Married Life. That’s another reason why he wasn’t the star of the show: he had too many other Keystone commitments to be released to work solely on the feature film.
Dressler’s career was suffering one of it’s regular downturns, so the offer to star in a film couldn’t have come at a better time (she’d made two previous film appearances but as herself; Tillie’s Punctured Romance would be her first on screen performance as a fictional character). According to Glenn Mitchell in The Chaplin Encyclopedia, Dressler showed a great deal of business sense in organising distribution of the film through her husband’s company (this proved problematic later when distribution was actually handled by the Alco Film Company instead) and in claiming a co-ownership in the film itself. It was Keystone’s writer (or ‘scenario editor’, as they were then known) Craig Hutchinson who suggested filming the play that had brought Dressler great success, a notion no doubt welcomed by the actress as an opportunity to revisit past glories.
Sennett was determined to make a big success of America’s first feature length comedy film, but wanted to focus more on the character of Tillie rather than in making a straight adaptation of Tillie’s Nightmare. Every resource his studio had was put in service of the film, with production weaving in and out of the studio’s regular output. It wasn’t an easy task as Dressler, more used to the environment of the stage, found it difficult to adapt to the techniques of film acting, something that Charlie Chaplin had quickly grasped instinctively. He was, in fact, in the process of pioneering a whole new approach to screen acting, something Dressler seems to have failed to grasp. The film was promoted as ‘The Impossible Attained: a SIX REEL comedy!’
Playing a ‘city slicker’ type villain in a standard, if over long, Keystone caper probably did not appeal to Chaplin at this point. This film was made just as he was beginning to develop his Tramp character in new ways, taking ever more control of his own projects. Now, he was playing second fiddle to a theatre ‘star’ who employed the standard neo-Victorian over-emotive screen acting previously used by Ford Sterling (long gone from Keystone by this point). Under the direction of Mack Sennett, Mabel Normand’s role (she gets a significant close-up) was probably considered of more importance than Chaplin’s moustache twirler (his two piece minimalist moustache is not long enough for him to actually twirl it, nor is it full enough to hide his youth). It would be the last time (apart from guest appearances) that Chaplin would appear in a movie under someone else’s direction.
Even more irritating to Chaplin may have been Dressler’s later claim (in her own unreliable memoirs) to have ‘discovered’ the screen comedian. ‘I went up on the [Keystone] lot and I looked around until I found Charlie Chaplin who was then unknown,’ she said of beginning work on Tillie’s Punctured Romance. ‘I picked him out and also Mabel Normand. I think the public will agree that I am a good picker for it was the first real chance Charlie Chaplin ever had.’
The film’s theatrical origins are occasionally painfully obvious: it is split into six acts, separated by title cards. The opening sees Dressler appear in front of a curtain apparently as herself, before the scene dissolves to show her in character (a theatrical curtain also closes the film, and the principals, including Chaplin, take their bows). Despite being middle-aged, Dressler portrays Tillie as a ‘girl’ who quickly falls for Chaplin’s city slicker, although he’s only interested in her as a way to access the family fortune. He convinces the love-struck Tillie to elope with him and escape her abusive father, kicking off a series of adventures as the country ‘girl’ encounters city life. Cars and clothes give her problems, as does her new-love’s unexpected girlfriend (Normand). Plying Tillie with drink, Chaplin and Normand make off with her purse, buying themselves new clothes while Tillie deals with the law. After a brief stay with her uncle, Tillie finds herself homeless and penniless, finally winning a job at a local cafe. At the movies, Chaplin and Normand see a film in which a thief gets his just deserts. Feeling guilty, they track down Tillie—but learning of the family fortune they hatch a new plan. Much chaos follows, especially during a sequence set at a society ball in which Tillie pelts Charlie with ornaments and finally shoots off a pistol wildly in his direction. Tillie is then disenfranchised, so she pursues Chaplin and Normand, still waving the gun, and chase is soon joined by the Keystone Kops. Inevitably, in the way of Sennett and Keystone, several major players end up running off the end of the pier and splashing into the water. By the end, Tillie and Mabel are friends, and both turn their backs on the city slicker.
Chaplin’s character resembles more some of the earlier non-Tramp roles he played, people who have fallen low in society and are simply out for themselves. There’s enough comedy here, though, to make up for the absence of the Tramp character. His seduction of Tillie is well-done. Chaplin’s biographer David Robinson saw hints of a much later character in Chaplin’s performance here: ‘At moments, Chaplin’s characterisation of the deft, funny, heartless adventurer anticipates Verdoux, even though Verdoux could never insult the footmen and an effeminate guest at a party as Chaplin does.’ Robinson also noted that the screen experience of both Chaplin and Normand put them in a different league to Dressler whose ‘warm personality wins through’ nonetheless. Indeed, of the trio it was Normand who had the most film experience in front and behind the camera.
When the finished film was screened at a trade show on 14 November 1914 (ads began appearing in the press during the previous week), it was Chaplin rather than Dressler who found himself the centre of attention. When the film had been completed in the summer, Chaplin’s star was only just beginning to rise. Now, as the year was coming to a close, he’d become the most famous screen personality on the planet, and his services were much in demand. It was Chaplin, too, who drew comment from the critics. ‘Chaplin outdoes Chaplin,’ wrote Moving Picture World of Tillie’s Punctured Romance. ‘That’s all there is to it. His marvellous right-footed skid … is just as funny in the last reel as it is in the first.’ While Variety rightly highlighted Dressler as the film’s putative star, their correspondent went on to note that ‘Chaplin’s antics are an essential feature in putting the picture over.’ While his supporting role was seen as essential to the film’s success. It wasn’t a production that Chaplin thought much of. ‘It was pleasant working with Marie,’ he wrote in My Autobiography, ‘but I did not think that the picture had much merit. I was more than happy to get back to directing myself.’ While Sennett was hailed for his groundbreaking move in producing the first comedy feature film, Chaplin had outgrown the Keystone way of making movies and was ready to further develop his craft elsewhere. Many kicks up the backside were to follow.
Slapstick: A brick tossed by ‘the girl’ knocks ‘the stranger’ to the ground—that’s a 1914 example of cinematic ‘meet cute’. The pair then play footsie. However, courting proves painful for the city swell. Traffic proves a baffling obstacle for the ‘country girl’ in the big city, as does alcohol. There’s a lovely Tramp-style foot skid as Chaplin and Normand exit the cafe having stolen the country girl’s purse. At the police station, she drunkenly puts the bite on the desk sergeant. Chaplin has his usual trouble with swing doors as he enters the clothes store. Chaplin doesn’t appreciate the musical accompaniment to the film-within-the-film, nor the appearance of his analogue on screen. The reveal of Charley Chase’s lawman badge (he’s sitting next to them in the cinema) is the final straw… When the girl recognises Chaplin in the cafe he gets a face full of food and makes a swift exit. In attempting to get to the new heiress first, Chaplin has to navigate a wet floor, with inevitable consequences. High society proves to be physically challenging for the new groom (and for new servant Mabel), especially on the dance floor. A run-in with Chester Conklin’s party guest unleashes the usual Keystone tit-for-tat slaps and punches. A follow-up encounter sees punches thrown around the punch bowl. Chaplin struts his stuff on and off the dance floor with Marie, while Mabel drains the punch bowl. Cakes then a gun are Marie’s weapons of choice when she discovers Charlie and Mabel in a clinch, kicking off the long-time-coming climatic chase sequence. Charlie and Mabel exit, pursued by a bear, sorry, by Marie Dressler. A footman calls the Keystone Kops, who chase everyone off the end of the pier.
Verdict: The ultimate Keystone-Mack Sennett movie, for good or ill…3/5
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CHARLIE CHAPLIN: A CENTENARY CELEBRATION
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
Story: In the Stone Age, Charlie is still the Tramp…
Production: Spurred by the 1912 discovery of ‘Piltdown Man’ (early human remains later revealed to be a hoax), a host of films, comedic and more serious, dealt with the topic of ancient man and prehistory. For Biograph, D.W. Griffith had produced Man’s Genesis (1912). Buster Keaton included prehistory as one of his Three Ages (1923, spoofing Griffith’s Intolerance, 1916). Much later, in 1928 Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy appeared individually (before they were teamed up) as cavemen in Flying Elephants for Hal Roach. His Prehistoric Past—the last of his shorts released by Keystone—was Chaplin’s idiosyncratic take on the same subject matter.
Chaplin uses dreams as a way in to telling his story, with the Tramp falling asleep on a park bench and imagining his prehistoric adventure. This neatly explains the brilliant comic conceit of having Chaplin’s prehistoric figure sporting the same bowler hat, cane and moustache he always does (not that this would have particularly needed explaining, as it is such a brilliant move). His usual well-worn costume is replaced by movie-friendly animal skins. Chaplin’s character, called Weak Chin, comes across another tribe lead by Mack Swain’s King Low-Brow. Weak Chin quickly falls in love with the King’s favourite of his many wives, and then replaces the King when it is thought he’s died by falling off a cliff. The return of the King leads to comic violence and a rude awakening for the sleeping Tramp in the park.
The policeman at the short’s climax, whose taps on the head awakens Charlie from his alfresco slumbers, was played by Chaplin’s older half-brother, Sydney. It had long been believed that Syd had started work at Keystone after Charlie left, but in the early 1980s Bo Berglund (of Classic Images) identified Syd as the policeman in His Prehistoric Past. It would have been the first time the brothers worked together on film.
In his autobiography, Chaplin recalled how one simple joke had given rise to a two-reel short comedy: ‘I started with one gag, which was my first entrance. I appeared as a prehistoric man, wearing a bearskin, and, as I scanned the landscape, I began pulling the hair from the bearskin to fill my pipe. This was enough of an idea to stimulate a prehistoric story, introducing love, rivalry, combat, and chase. This was the method by which we all worked at Keystone.’ This may have been enough to get Chaplin started, but it is unfortunate that his final two-reeler is one of the less inventive from his time at Keystone, resembling nothing more than (as James L. Neibaur points out) ‘a disjointed version of a Keystone “park” comedy, with a different setting and costumes.’
In a series of appearances in Chaplin’s late-Keystone works, Mack Swain’s bulk had been effectively contrasted with Chaplin’s own slight frame, and in the previous two shorts with that of Mabel Normand, too. Here, Chaplin has the large man play against type as the King of this prehistoric tribe. Swain seems to have thrown himself enthusiastically into this role, following Chaplin’s acted-out directions fairly closely. This approach to coaching his co-stars to give exactly the performance he needed would follow Chaplin through his work at the next few studios where he set up shop.
The reception of Chaplin’s work was to change over the coming years, with his 12 month stint at Keystone often relegated to a long forgotten past. Even as soon as 1919, a mere five years later, Chaplin’s earlier work was being dismissed in comparison with his films for Essanay, Mutual, and First National. When His Prehistoric Past was revived in 1919, the New York Times dismissed it as ‘an early Keystone product of the time when Chaplin’s mastery of pantomime had not been developed or discovered’. Contrary to that opinion, it is clear that in re-viewing Charlie Chaplin’s first year of work in movies from Keystone in 1914, not only did his art develop dramatically across those 12 months but his ‘mastery of pantomime’ was, in fact, in place early on, even if the material didn’t always allow him to display it.
There may have been other good reasons why this short (made after Tillie’s Punctured Romance, but released before that feature film) was underpowered. Chaplin claimed that he was distracted both by the impending end of his contract at Keystone and by the offers now coming in from rival studios for his services. Chaplin notes in his autobiography that completing his final short was ‘a strain, because it was hard to concentrate with so many business propositions dangling before me.’ The comic had attended a Motion Picture Ball in November 1914, when both this and Getting Acquainted were made, and the offers from other studios seemed to gain new urgency around then. There was nothing Mack Sennett could do to either keep his star name ignorant of the possibilities of work elsewhere nor was there any offer he could make that would keep Chaplin at Keystone. He’d learned all he could within the limiting confines of that studio’s working methods, and while grateful for the education, it was time for him to try something else somewhere new.
Sennett was outbid for Chaplin’s services by Jess Robbins at Essanay who offered the comic star a $10,000 signing bonus and a weekly fee of $1250: that was enough for Chaplin and his business manager, half-brother Sydney, to sign on the dotted line. By the middle of December what the Washington Post described as ‘one of the most popular comedy artists in the motion picture industry’ had a new home. ‘It was a wrench leaving Keystone,’ Chaplin admitted. ‘I had grown fond of Sennett and everyone there. I never said goodbye to anyone; I couldn’t. I finished cutting my film on Saturday night and left the following Monday.’
Slapstick: An arrow in the rump gets the prehistoric Tramp’s attention, then the rocks start flying. Soon, the Tramp’s a (rather violent) jester at King Swain’s prehistoric court. A frolic in the waves with the King’s best gal pal gets the Tramp into trouble. A slap-happy duel follows and the King takes quite a tumble. A rock dropped on his head brings the Tramp back to all-too-modern reality.
Verdict: A soft end to Chaplin’s Keystone capers, 3/5
An 80,000 word ebook chronicle of Chaplin’s early films from Keystone (1914) and Essanay (1915), based on the blog postings at Chaplin: Film by Film with 20,000 words of supplemental biographical essays.
Chaplin: Film by Film 