Century Film Project

Here’s an early Charlie Chaplin movie from Keystone  in which he does not play his “Little Tramp” character, but is good nonetheless. Charlie is a well-to-do fellow (enough to have a car and servants in 1914) who wears a variation on his getup from “Making a Living” or “Mabel at the Wheel,” but with more understated facial hair. He’s in love with Minta Durfee (real life wife of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, who we saw with him in “The Rounders” and “Fatty Joins the Force”), but she catches him canoodling with the maid and calls off the engagement. Despondent, Charlie goes home and attempts suicide, but the butler replaces his poison with water. Charlie makes a show his imminent demise and Minta races to the rescue, having forgiven him. Some comic doctors show up, but Charlie’s strenuous acrobatics keep them from getting much done. Finally, having wrecked his room and given flying kicks to nearly everyone, Charlie is alone with Minta, apparently happy to be alive and in love.

This movie was quite early in Chaplin’s screen appearances, and it looks to me as though Mack Sennett used it as a means to display Charlie’s comedic physicality. The race to the rescue does include some interesting inter-cutting, showing that the techniques of editing had made their way to the smaller studios already, and for his fantasy of arriving in Hell as a suicide, we get some basic Méliès-style magical effects. Also, one shot of Charlie maddened face as he imagines the “poison” taking effect counts as a medium close-up, although he moves away from the camera afterward returning to “normal” distance from it.

Directors: Mack Sennett, George Nichols

Camera: Frank D. Williams

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Minta Durfee, Edgar Kennedy

Run Time: 9 Min

You can watch it for free: here.