Century Film Project

This very slight early cartoon uses Charlie Chaplin’s image and a familiar setting to evoke movies like “The Tramp” without actually involving Chaplin or using any of his gags. It is similar to some others we’ve seen, like “Charlie on the Windmill” and “Charlie and the Indians.”

A lightly-sketched background shows a train pulling out of a tunnel into a rural landscape. The train pulls into a station and one of the boxcars opens up, ejecting Charlie, who is being booted unceremoniously off by a railroad worker. He dusts himself off and walks away. He comes to a fence, from which he watches the courtship of a chicken. She is attracted to the rooster, who asks to marry her, but refuses to give up his other girlfriends, so she tries to get the duck to move in. He agrees, and says he would be happy to help raise a family, until she calls in her many children. He flies out of the window and into the distance. Now Charlie sees a man hanging a sign announcing a need for farm hands. Charlie applies for the job. The farmer tells him to milk the cows. Charlie doesn’t know how it’s done, so he takes off his coat and hat and turns the cows’ tails like they are cranks. He sees a milkmaid milking nearby, and watches as the cow’s stomach goes from full to empty, but fails to learn anything; he just goes on cranking. He then tries turning the tail of a bull, which of course chases him until he gets stuck in a knothole in the fence, then butts him so he flies through the air. He bounces off the backside of a caricatured African American laundress and flies back to the other side of the fence, where he sees a pig’s tail, and above it the head of a woman. He’s confused until he looks over the fence to see that the girl is in a hammock above the pig.

Charlie reports back to the farmer who tells him to dress some poultry for dinner, so he puts fancy clothes on them and brings them to the house, where they all eat at the table. The caricatured maid takes advantage of their presence to get some eggs for her cake. Now Charlie gets ready for bed after a hard day’s work, but the night sounds of the countryside keep him awake. He looks out his window to cats howling on the fence and frogs croaking out, “work! Work! Work!” in the pond. Before he can even get in bed, the farmer knocks on his door to get him started on the morning chores. Charlie leaps out his window, retrieves his hat and coat from where he left them outside and runs off. Seeing a sign that promises easy work on another farm, he runs away again, not willing to be bitten twice.

These cartoons were produced by Universal without Chaplin’s approval, but unlike some of the live “imitators,” he couldn’t get court approval to shut them down under copyright law at the time. The bare-bones images and unimaginative gags probably didn’t do much for his brand, but they did keep his image in the public view at a time when he wasn’t producing much. It’s odd that the writers spent so much time on the chickens, ducks, and other farm animals, rather than Charlie’s antics. Possibly they couldn’t come up with enough ideas, not having seen “The Tramp” for several years themselves. It seems to me as if animation still had a long way to go before Walt Disney and other animators caught it up to live-action cinema as a form of entertainment.

Director: Pat Sullivan

Run Time: 10 Min

You can watch it for free: here.