Century Film Project

Celebrating the movies our ancestors loved

Tag: Keystone Cops

May 14, 2023

A Lover’s Lost Control (1915)

Syd Chaplin, in the year after his more famous brother’s departure from Keystone, attempted to build a slapstick career of his own at the studio with his character of “Gussle.” Running through similar situations to those faced by the Little Tramp, how does Syd fair as an early comedian? This short is one example.

Lovers Lost Control2

The movie begins by showing us Gussle and his wife, played by Phyllis Allen, arriving by auto in front of a department store. The exterior shot gives us a look at Los Angeles of the day, with Syd’s car looking a bit antiquated compared to the sedan across the street – which is parked behind a horse & buggy, reminding us of the transitional nature of technology in the teens. He and Phyllis indulge a few pratfalls before moving on to the main center of action. Gussle, like Charlie, wears ill-fitting clothes and carries a cane. His mustache is small, but it does have small handlebars that cover more of his lip. His wife approaches the counter in what seems to be the ladies’ underthings area of the store while he tries to hit on shopgirls and customers. In the process, he gets a rather suggestive item caught on his cane and tries to conceal the mannequin’s less-dressed state. Phyllis becomes annoyed with him and boxes his ear before dragging him back to the counter by it. Read the rest of this entry »

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February 19, 2022

Gussle’s Day of Rest (1915)

This Mack Sennett “park comedy” stars Charlie Chaplin’s brother Sydney in a role about as close to the “Little Tramp” as possible. Although by 1915, Charlie had begun making more sympathetic movies about his character, Syd is still definitely in the earlier mode of funny-because-he’s-so-bad.

Gussles Day of Rest

The movie begins with Gussle (Syd) and his wife (Phyllis Allen) at the boardwalk, looking out into the ocean. A boy approaches Gussle and offers to sell him a newspaper. Gussle agrees, but has no money on him, so he cadges some from his wife. He sees that she keeps her change in a stocking, and sticks the end of it (the part with the coins) into his pocket, then uses a pair of scissors to snip off the part that is in her hand. When Nancy sees this, he tries to accuse the salesboy, but she is onto him. They then pass by a bar, and Gussle tries to go in, but wifey stops him. The go into a park, standing on the road, and squabble for a while until Gussle is suddenly hit from behind by a car and knocked over. The driver of that car (Slim Summerville) was distracted by his passenger (Cecile Arnold), and soon Gussle is, too. Now, Gussle and his wife squabble with Slim and Gussle pushes the car back with his foot a couple of times, causing it to careen wildly in reverse, but Slim drives back to the scene each time. Phyliis faints from all the exertion, but somehow manages to wake up to hit Gussle each time he shows too much interest in Cecile or takes a swig of the whiskey offered to help wake her up.

Gussles Day of Rest1

Gussle and Phyllis continue their day in the park, eventually snoozing under a tree together. Gussle wakes up first and blows cigar smoke into her open mouth, then puts a balloon in it. He distracts her when she awakes, annoyed, by calling her attention to the birds singing, then takes out a slingshot and starts trying to shoot them down. His aim is apparently poor, however; both he and his wife wind up getting a round in the eye when they return to earth. Slim and Cecile, meanwhile, have set up a picnic, which Gussle crashes, evidently with Cecile’s approval. Gussle somehow gets a fork stuck in his behind, which takes a good deal of effort on the part of Slim and Cecile to withdraw.

Gussles Day of Rest2

Annoyed by Gussle’s interloping, Slim tries to enlist the aid of Gussle’s wife, but she thinks he’s a masher when he wakes her up, and she knocks him down. Soon, Gussle and Slim are fighting, and Cecile takes a powder. Then Phyllis joins in and soon is fighting Cecile as well. Phyllis chases Gussle, who knocks a zookeeper into the pen with a leopard. This gives Gussle the good idea of doing the same thing with his wife, then going back to collect Cecile. A cop (Edward F. Cline) takes an interest, and Gussle sends Cecile away, then distracts him by sashaying around the well until he can hit him with his own billy club. With Phyllis and Slim in pursuit, Gussle puts Cecile in the car, but he can’t get it to start. Finally, it starts just in time to run over the cop, who hits Slim when he gets up again. The end is a high-speed chase with Gussle and Cecile in the car and the others on foot. Cecile’s gestures show us the car is out of control and Gussle swerves all over the road. They crash into a construction site where dynamite is being used, and an explosion dumps dirt all over the car. Gussle pokes his head out of the dirt, but there’s no sign of Cecile. He digs down until he finds her hair, then tugs at it and it comes off – revealing itself as a wig and the top of her head as bald. Gussle puts the wig back and pushes the dirt over it. The end.

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It’s typical enough of the genre, but without whatever the magic was that made Charlie transcend it. Certain scenes, such as the cigar-smoke sequence and the fork in the behind, have the feeling of being ad-libbed comedy of the sort Charlie excelled at, but which just falls flat in Syd’s hands. There are more close-ups than you might expect for a 1915 movie, but the quality of the existing prints makes it hard to appreciate. Syd seems to play “innocent” a lot, fluttering his eyelashes and tilting his head to the side, but his cuteness doesn’t make up for the unlikability of his character. It was funny to spot Buster Keaton‘s future co-director, Edward Cline, in the role of the cop. Here, he’s a typical hot-headed Keystone Kop, which is kind of needed to distract us from Syd’s performance. Like a lot of two-reelers, the movie is divided into a “part one” and “part two,” but without any clear division between them. On the whole, it seems to me that cutting it down to a single reel would have been the best way to make it funnier.

Director: F. Richard Jones

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Sydney Chaplin, Phyllis Allen, Slim Summerville, Cecile Arnold, Edward F. Cline

Run Time: 20 Min, 30 secs

You can watch it for free: here (complete, with a terrible soundtrack), or here (incomplete, worse quality print, but better music).

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May 22, 2021

The Noise of Bombs (1914)

This short comedy from Keystone Studios displays both the studio’s embrace of anarchic fun and its rejection of political anarchism in a single blow. It uses violence and the Keystone Kops to deliver the mayhem audiences were looking for.

The movie begins by introducing the Chief of Police (Edgar Kennedy) and his family – an unusually intimate portrayal for a Keystone Kop. He has a wife and small baby, as well as young uniformed maid (Dixie Chene), living with him in a small but comfortable home. The maid, laughing and smiling, takes the baby outside. He kisses his wife goodbye  and goes off to work. We cut to a more familiar Keystone tableaux, as a cop (Charles Murray) with a rounded helmet yawns and stretches out for a nap on a park bench. At an undetermined location elsewhere in the park, we see four shady-looking characters with mustaches (who include Harry McCoy and Charley Chase) crouched down, participating in a dice game or some similar activity. Suddenly, Kennedy comes across them and chases them into the bushes. They all tumble across the bench where Murray is napping, knocking him down. Murray jumps up and gets his billy club ready to hit anyone else that comes through the bushes and of course Kennedy does and Murray clocks him before realizing he’s the boss.

Murray and Kennedy sort things out, but the criminals get away. Kennedy finds the maid on her walk and says hi to his baby, unaware that they are watching him. Now Murray finds the maid in the park and gives her a kiss, showing that they know one another. She lets him hold the baby and goes shopping, and when Kennedy finds him slacking off again, he removes his stripes and badge. After he leaves, the bad guys swarm in and take the cop and baby hostage. They take him back to their hideout which is full of dynamite and explosives, and they prepare a note threatening to blow up Kennedy’s house. Then they give Murray the note and a classic round black bomb to deliver. They don’t trust him, so they go with him, leaving the baby in a pile of dynamite.

Murray breaks in to the house and places the note, but gets his foot stuck hiding the bomb, so has to climb into the settee with it. When the family finds the note, they panic, but instead of evacuating, they start tearing the house apart looking for it, looking everywhere but the settee. Eventually, Murray makes his presence obvious, after the wife engages with a comedic battle to keep the rebellious settee closed. The bomb is smoking now, and everyone runs out, Kennedy eventually throws it into Murray’s hands and fires his gun to make him run. He crashes into the anarchists, and a running shootout begins as more cops arrive. Murray runs back to the hideout, with the gangsters and the police close behind, and finds the baby. As he gets ready to rush out, the bad guys get to the front door and Kennedy hurls the bomb into the shack. Murray climbs up onto the roof while the bad guys try to shoot the door open. They get in, he seals the trap door and the cops are at the front, with the anarchists trapped inside with their own bomb. Murray grabs a telephone wire and hand-over-hands himself to safety, the baby’s swaddling clothes held in his teeth. All of the good guys rush over to congratulate him and the bomb finally goes off, destroying the shack, all the explosives, and presumably the villains.

The trope of the bomb-throwing anarchist, while based to some degree on radical direct action of the time, had by 1914 become a trope of political cartoons and other media, and was often associated with racism against immigrants, especially those from Southern Europe. We’ve seen it used before, including in Charlie Chaplin’s “Easy Street,” but it is taken to a clumsy extreme in this movie to create anti-cop bad guys that will be instantly recognizable and not require any back story, which a single-reel film like this one has no time for. It stands out because Keystone Kops humor often mocks the police, and much of the more well-remembered slapstick of the time glamorized the little man (or tramp) who managed to get the better of them. There is some of that mockery here, in Murray’s incompetence and Kennedy’s bullying, but ultimately we see the police in this movie as on the side of right. Still, it’s all really just a set up for manic running around and the tension of wondering when the bomb will go off.

For us today, it’s a rarity to get to see a Keystone Kops movie that actually stars…the cops, and not someone like Chaplin, Ford Sterling, or Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle. This is probably more representative of the vast majority of Keystone output that didn’t trade on any star power of big personalities, but just worked to a comedy formula that was known to work. The standard of film making is pretty typical as well. We get an insert shot of the note, a couple of brief close-ups, and a few two-shots, but most of the movie is played at proscenium distance with characters moving about little stages, linked together through editing. The editing is fast, as you would expect in a comedy, and uses cross-cutting to heighten the tension of the bomb and the rescue. The result is cheap, effective, funny at times, and recognizably Keystone.

Director: Mack Sennett

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Charles Murray, Edgar Kennedy, Dixie Chene, Harry McCoy, Charley Chase, Lucille Ward, Josef Swickard, Edward F. Cline

Run Time: 11 Min

I have not found this available to watch complete on the internet. If you do, please comment. You can see a brief sample: here.

 

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January 2, 2021

Shot in the Excitement (1914)

This short comedy from Keystone stars Al St. John in an a-typical sympathetic role and uses a familiar story of two country bumpkins vying for the interests of one girl, but escalates to extreme speed and violence before the end. A rather unusual entry in Keystone’s catalog, this holds up in interesting ways today.

The film begins by introducing “the Daughter” (Alice Howell), who is busy whitewashing a fence with her father (Josef Swickard). We then see Al, introduced as “A Suitor” by the intertitles, and carrying a small gift. She eagerly abandons her work to rush over and see him, just as a second suitor (Rube Miller, who is also credited as director) walks up with a small bouquet of flowers for her. He is on the wrong side of the fence, however, and gets an eyeful of whitewash from the father when he tries peeking through a knothole. He then locates Alice and Al, and decides to frighten them by dangling a rubber spider overhead. They interrupt their smooching in shock, but then Al pokes his finger through another knothole, once again getting Rube in the eye. When he tries sticking his finger through, Alice grabs it and bites it, holding him in place long enough for Al to drop a rock on his head. Rube tries throwing a bigger rock over the fence, but winds up hitting Alice, of course. Rube now climbs over the fence and starts fighting with Al, in the process hitting both Alice and her father. The father chases Rube up a ladder and onto a rooftop, where he tries again to hit Al by throwing rainwater and other found objects, but never manages to hit his actual target. Al finds a shotgun and tries to shoot Rube, but only hits the father’s backside, knocking him off the roof. Dad now shoots Rube off the roof, throwing both boys off his property and telling them to keep away from his daughter.

Dejected, Al and Rube head to a nearby park. Al finds a park bench, where he could have a rendezvous with Alice, and Rube finds an old cannon, conveniently pointed at the park bench. He gets some gunpowder together and loads it up, then sets up an elaborate booby trap, placing a triggering device beneath the legs of the bench, so that the cannon will fire when Al sits down. He sends a confederate to give Al a note, ostensibly from Alice, telling him to meet her at the bench. There is a bit of comedic tension, as it looks like Al will sit several times while examining the note, but suddenly Alice walks up and distracts him. Now Rube, concerned that she will sit in the “hot” seat, intervenes, but Al quickly kicks him away. They fight while Alice cheers, until Al knocks Rube out with a rock, causing him to fall back on the bench. The cannonball flies over him and knocks over a couple of nearby Keystone Kops, then flies past Alice and starts chasing her father. Rube manages to launch a second cannonball, which now pursues Al and Alice. Now the Kops come over to arrest him and a wild three-way chase ensues, ending with Rube falling down a cliff, being arrested and everyone being knocked down when the cannonballs finally explode against the cliffside.

The most exciting part of this movie is the chase sequence at the end, which is worthy of a Road Runner cartoon for its silliness and implied violence. The editing between three simultaneous, inter-locked chases works perfectly to ramp of the crescendo of chaotic wildness. Everyone falls over several times. Cannonballs turn around and change direction in order to pursue their quarry. Alice and Al refuse to let go of one another. I would bet that in a theater, this last two and a half minutes would have people laughing so hard their sides hurt. The characterizations are interesting also. Rube’s character reminds me of Al in “Mabel and Fatty Adrift,” although he seems not to want to extend his revenge to killing Alice, she is just collateral damage in trying to take out Al. Al’s character is more like the sort of thing his cousin Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle would specialize in, except Al’s more frenetic in his amorous intentions. Alice Howell is the big success – a somewhat “funny-looking” girl, she is part of the joke as we wonder how desperate these two yokels must be to fight over her. And she is great with the falls, hits, and other physicality. While some people may be put off by the cartoon violence, for my money, this is one of the funnier Keystone comedies.

Director: Rube Miller

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Al St. John, Alice Howell, Rube Miller, Josef Swickard

Run Time: 12 Min

You can watch it for free: here.

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December 25, 2020

The Great Toe Mystery (1914)

This short comedy from Keystone Studios seems to play upon themes established 11 years earlier in “The Gay Shoe Clerk,” but with a touch of Mack Sennett’s chaotic style thrown in for flavor. It still looks a bit old-fashioned for 1914, possibly deliberately so.

The movie begins with an establishing shot outside of a shoe store. A young lady (Alice Howell) and a man with a silly mustache are standing in front, and he takes her by the arm and leads her inside. We now cut to the interior, where a thin, slightly foppish young man speaks to them. Evidently the first man is buying shoes for himself and his wife. The first shoe clerk summons another over to see to the gentleman, and he leads the lady to the other side of the store, where she sits while the salesman summons another clerk (Charley Chase), this one being flamboyant and feminine in his gestures. She offers him her foot to measure, but he reacts in melodramatic horror to see her toes peeking through the end of a torn stocking. He seems to be lecturing her on hygiene, and she reacts by looking away from him. The husband sees this, and comes over to glare at the clerk. He runs to the back, to get her shoes ready for sale, and decides to put a note in her shoes. He borrows a pen and paper from a female coworker, and then delivers the shoebox to the clearly annoyed lady customer. She and the husband exit the store, evidently arguing about the clerk’s unwanted attentions. They go in separate directions.

The wife returns home (“broken-hearted,” according to an intertitle) and commiserates with her maid (Dixie Chene). She takes a magazine outside to read, discarding the unlucky shoes unopened. Meanwhile, “Mr. Birdie” (the clerk) is now going to the park to for what he hopes to be a rendezvous with a married woman. Of course, he encounters Alice on a park bench, sobbing because of the fight with her husband, and sits next to her, oblivious to her feelings. Now the husband comes home and finds the discarded shoes with the note, vowing to murder the clerk (whom he de-genders as “it” in the intertitles) if he finds them together. The maid is meanwhile flirting with a rather dim-witted young man (possibly a delivery boy, from his attire, or else another servant like a gardener), to the husband’s decided disapproval. The husband rushes out to the park and finds the two of them together, making threatening gestures that the clerk laughs off until he produces a gun and starts shooting at the ground.

Now, a classic Keystone chase begins, and the wife and the maid rapidly enlist the aid of Keystone Kops. Of course, the clerk decides to hide in a chest that the dim-looking servant brings into the house, so now he has no possibility of escape. A comedy routine involves the many steps the servant has to go up (and frequently falls back down) while carrying the chest and tension is held as several people start to open the chest before being distracted by something else. Ultimately, the maid finds him and the chase begins anew, with Birdie hiding in the dumbwaiter, unable to find an unoccupied room to escape into. The Kops now arrive in force, and begin shooting at the servant, not evidently knowing who they are after or why. He hides under the sink, which the Kops promptly shoot full of holes. Finally, the clerk manages to fight everyone off with his handkerchief, knocking over the whole cast, and, snapping his fingers, leaves the house with a rude gesture.

Charley Chase’s performance really makes this movie something special, and it’s very hard for a modern audience not to read his gestures and body language as queer – something which quite possibly could have been intentional on his part, whether or not audiences of 1914 were sophisticated enough to get the joke. That makes it twice as funny that the title of the obvious inspiration of “The Gay Shoe Clerk” had a different meaning at the time. It also struck me with this viewing that the title’s similarity to the other 1903 hit “The Great Train Robbery” (itself basically a well-edited chase movie) might have been intentional as well, meaning that Sennett was lampooning Edison in more than one way here. The editing of this movie keeps it moving effectively, and all of the random elements work together well, with the absurdity of the situation constantly growing, but without giving the audience too much time to reflect on how silly it all is. This is one of the more fun Keystones I’ve seen, in fact and it holds up well enough today.

Director: Charles Avery

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Charley Chase, Alice Howell, Dixie Chene, Chester Conklin, Harry McCoy, Rube Miller

Run Time: 11 Min, 8 secs

You can watch it for free: here.

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December 12, 2020

A Thief Catcher (1914)

This slapstick short from Keystone Studios stars Ford Sterling once again, but this time a bit part is played by newcomer Charlie Chaplin. The complete film has not been preserved, unfortunately, but there’s enough here to get the idea.

The footage begins in a Keystone Kop hq set, with various officers running around and arguing with the desk man. An intertitle precedes the scene with the single word “Yeggmen,” which is odd because usually this would describe criminals and not police. However, shortly afterward we do see three hoodlums, dressed roughly like burglars, having a scrape in a field (one of them is Mack Swain). Swain and his ally push the third man to the ground and take some articles from him. Ford Sterling now walks up to a tree carrying a small dog and a large box that might be a camera. From his reactions, we discern that he is close by and seeing the holdup in the field, although his background looks totally different. The camera cuts to show us the fight is taking place at the edge of a steep cliff – eventually the two ruffians toss the other fellow off from this precipice. Sterling seems to be taking pictures. He puts his hand over the dog’s mouth, giving the impression that it has just barked and given him away, and, sure enough, we see Swain look up and see someone snooping. He and his compatriot come over and Sterling makes a run for it, beginning the chase that defines the rest of the footage.

Sterling’s all wet.

The hoods now produce a gun and Sterling runs through back alleys trying to evade them. In one comic sequence, the hoods grab a large woman behind a sheet, thinking it is Sterling, and in another, a man opens his gate, not realizing that Sterling is hiding on the other side, and throws a bucket of water on him. Eventually, he drops the dog and the camera, but finds himself what looks like a good place to hide, in a shack that unfortunately for him is “the Yegg’s Hangout” according to an intertitle. At this point we get out first glimpses of a star on his chest, which has been hidden beneath his coat all along, suggesting that he was not just an innocent observer, but possibly a cop on the trail of these criminals from the beginning. Having hidden out long enough, he thinks, he tries to leave quietly, only to find the crooks standing right by the front door. He runs around the hideout, looking for a place to hide, and we get a close-up of his face peering from one room into the next after the crooks enter. Eventually, he tries hiding behind one of their jackets, which does not conceal him at all. The chase begins again, confined to the two rooms of the shack, and both bad guys now have guns. It looks like Sterling is through. They toss a coin to decide who will do the honors of killing him.

Chaplin looks like he just ate something nasty throughout the film.

One goes into the room with the gun, while Swain steps out the front door. Now the little dog runs up, seeming completely unafraid when Swain pulls out his gun and shoots at it. Now two cops come up to investigate, and one of them is Chaplin, complete with his tiny mustache. They hassle the hoods and push them around outside the shack while Sterling stays mum, for some reason, still inside. The little dog decides to dig a hole, tunneling into the back of the shack. The hole isn’t big enough for Sterling to get out, but he puts a note on the dog and sends it running. Now the cops and the robbers both come into the shack, and Chaplin is about to open the door to the room where Sterling is hiding, but he whacks him with a broom to prevent anyone coming in. For some reason, this convinces Chaplin and his comrade to leave, rather than breaking the door down to find the violent fugitive. Another mad comic chase ensues in the two rooms of the shack, with Sterling now wrestling the two ruffians to keep from getting shot. The dog gets to the police station and the cops there read the note, piling into a car to race to the rescue. Sterling resorts to biting the leg of the man who is trying to shoot him, then manages to rush out of the shack just before the cops arrive, scaring Swain back inside. Now he and his companion are scampering for a place to hide as the cops rush in. Sterling runs back with a club and hits a cop as he peeks out the front door, knocking all of them down in a heap. Chaplin walks up from behind and apprehends Sterling, and for some reason both of them faint to the ground.

Perhaps the classic Keystone Kops image – right before everyone falls over when the car starts moving.

I think a lot of the mystery of what’s missing can be explained by Sterling’s badge – he’s an undercover cop, possibly known by Chaplin and the others, and that’s why it’s important that they never see him during the various chases, and he always winds up hitting them just as he could be rescued. This device stretches out the comic tension, which on the whole works pretty well. I have a feeling that the “thief catcher” of the title is actually the little dog. Anyway, looked at as a Ford Sterling movie, this is a pretty satisfying one with a lot of action and plenty of opportunities for him to do his famous funny faces and physical reactions. It also stands up as a strong entry in the Keystone Kops series, maybe not quite as good as “Fatty Joins the Force,” but pretty much what we’re looking for in terms of frenetic action and cops getting hit. For Chaplin, it’s a less auspicious appearance, which may explain why it hasn’t been preserved or promoted by his estate. He looks rather angry throughout the movie, and somehow in that uniform he looked more like Hitler than usual to me (audiences at the time would not have made the connection – Adolf Hitler was an obscure man with a larger mustache, based on the few photos that exist). His timing for the pratfalls is excellent, of course, but not better than anyone else in the film. Watch it for Ford Sterling and the Kops, not for Charlie Chaplin.

Director: Ford Sterling

Camera: Unknown

Starring: Ford Sterling, Mack Swain, Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Kennedy, William Hauber, Rube Miller, Phyllis Allen

Run Time: 8 Min, 30 secs (surviving footage)

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

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November 7, 2020

Gentlemen of Nerve (1914)

This short from Keystone seems to be yet another remake of Charlie Chaplin’s first appearance as the Little Tramp, but also demonstrates how far he had come as a director in a few months. He and the Keystone gang are once again at a racetrack, causing a ruckus.

The movie begins with Chester Conklin and Mabel Normand showing up together at the gate, while Mack Swain and Charlie both try to sneak past the guards to get in. Chester seems very jealous to protect Mabel from harassment by Mack, but has a decidedly roving eye once he sits down next to Phyllis Allen. Early in the picture, we get some actuality footage of drivers competitively changing tires as a part of the races. Meanwhile, after a brief confrontation, Charlie and Mack have teamed up t find a way into the races without paying. They find a loose board in the fence and try to slip through, but Mack is of course much too large and quickly gets stuck. Charlie tires pushing him through from behind, then crawls in through his legs and tries pulling from the other side. A group of revelers is on this side, watching their struggles with amusement. Charlie helps one of them fix a drink, then uses the spritzer to prevent a cop (Edgar Kennedy) from arresting Mack, who finally breaks through. He also sprays Mack in the process. They go their separate ways, and soon Charlie runs into Chester and Mabel.

Just don’t fart, Mack!

Mabel has gotten Chester away from Phyllis, but now she shows an interest in Charlie. They fight in front of a big crowd, most of whom seem to be more interested in Charlie than the races. Chester and Mabel go back to their seats near Phyllis, and get into a fight as well. Charlie finds a seat near Alice Davenport, who seems interested in him until he steals her soda, then starts offering it to other women. Soon Mabel trips over Charlie’s feet, and he seems uncertain which woman to focus on, especially after Mabel ruins his hat. Mabel and Charlie go to look at a race car with a propeller, and soon Charlie is running around the track to avoid getting hit. Chester now insults Phyllis by whispering something in her ear, and she hits him and he runs away, now discovering Mabel and Charlie together. He threatens violence against Mabel, and Charlie takes a long time removing his coat before hitting him. The cop finds Mack and arrests him just as Chester blunders into him from Charlie’s blow and both are taken in while Mabel and Charlie laugh in a close two-shot.

While this movie takes some advantage of the crowds and location of the race track, a lot of it is shot under much more controlled circumstances than “Kid Auto Races at Venice” and it more closely resembles “Mabel’s Busy Day,” except that Mabel and Charlie end up together, rather than as rivals. It’s very easy to see from the scenes with Chaplin in them that he was now a recognizable figure in public, and that the public was eager to watch him. I always remember when I watch these early Chaplins that many critics called him “vulgar” and I certainly thought about this during the scenes in which Charlie tries to push Mack through the fence, often by shoving on his buttocks or pushing them with a stick. There’s even some talk that the women in these movies could have been portraying sex workers, given their ready willingness to flit from one stranger to another, although Phyllis obviously wasn’t willing to go as far as Chester wanted on a first meeting. It seems as if Charlie had figured out by now that his Little Tramp character was the sympathetic one for audiences – he almost always comes out ahead in every situation here, while Mack and Chester are foils for his gags.

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Camera: Frank D. Williams

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Mabel Normand, Chester Conklin, Mack Swain, Alice Davenport, Edgar Kennedy

Run Time: 15 Min

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

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September 13, 2020

On His Wedding Day (1913)

Ford Sterling stars in this short comedy from Keystone before a certain gentleman with a cane and bowler hat showed up on the lot. It’s pretty typical of both Sterling and director Mack Sennett at the time.

Is everyone allergic to these flowers?

The movie begins by showing us the bride’s family at the church. The bride (Dot Farley) is cross-eyed and made up to look somewhat homely, foreshadowing what may come later. An intertitle tells us “Red Pepper” and we see a grocery clerk using said herb to make a friend sneeze. Now Sterling marches up in his wedding finery, carrying a bouquet of flowers, and the clerk sprinkles it with his pepper. Ford arrives at the church and unknowingly presents it to the bride and the minister (Hale Studebaker), who begin sneezing uncontrollably. The preacher, in search of fresh air, runs out of the church and into a park, and Sterling pursues, but is distracted when he comes across Mabel Normand and her boyfriend (Charles Avery). Ford quickly gets the idea of trading up, but before hitting on Mabel, he sends the parson back to the church. He easily shoves the smaller Avery out of the way and strikes up a conversation with Mabel. Avery locates a couple of local bums and pays them to beat up Sterling for him. While they are about it, he hastens back over to Mabel. Meanwhile, the wedding party is calling out for Sterling, but the thugs have stolen his clothes. Sterling is now running about in his long underwear, shocking Mabel and a passing woman. Mabel slugs Avery and goes her own way, but Sterling is now pursued by a police officer in a comic chase that soon draws in other cops and passersby. Trying to evade the police, Sterling climbs onto the roof of the church and drops through the chimney, now in no way presentable for his wedding. The movie devolves into a typical Keystone riot as the bride defends her groom by taking a cop’s billy club and bashing the whole crowd. They embrace at the end, so I guess it’s a happy ending, though they’re not married.

A sure way to impress a girl.

This was a cheaply done film with minimal plot and plenty of comic action, so quite what one expects from the Keystone studios at the time. Ford Sterling and Mabel Normand were two of the biggest stars at the lot, though this is pretty much Ford’s film. Given the persistent rumors that Mabel and Mack Sennett were dating at the time, I got a giggle out of the intertitle comparing her to “a goddess.” She does look decidedly better than cross-eyed Dot, and both girls get a chance to hit the men in the course of the slapstick silliness. There is a certain amount of inter-cutting between the wedding party and Ford’s attempted philandering, possibly Sennett showing off a technique he learned while working for D.W. Griffith, although it doesn’t really help the comedy much. A good example of Sennett’s pre-Chaplin work, there are no surprises or outstanding accomplishments here.

Director: Mack Sennett

Camera: unknown

Starring: Ford Sterling, Mabel Normand, Dot Farley, Charles Avery, Hale Studebaker, Nick Cogley, Helen Holmes

Run Time: 6 Min, 26 secs

You can watch part of it for free: here (no music). I have not found available complete for free streaming. If you do, please comment.

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September 12, 2020

Recreation (1914)

This early Charlie Chaplin short from Keystone is badly damaged and presumably partly lost, but enough of it has been salvaged to at least recognize it as a separate film from other movies of the time. Watching it is more of an exercise in film archaeology than an act of entertainment.

The movie begins on a park bench. A girl (Helen Carruthers) is sitting next to a man in sailor’s suit (Charles Bennett), but the man has fallen asleep, possibly from drink. Disgusted, the girl gets up and walks away. Next, we see Chaplin in his “Little Tramp” outfit on a bridge nearby. He checks his pocket for change and flip a coin, then makes a comic effort to climb over the railing on the bridge (to commit suicide?) but he does a pratfall instead. He seems to be doing calisthenics at the railing when the girl walks by. They smile at one another, he gives the river the raspberry, then follows her to another bench. However, she shows no interest in his advances, and keeps moving further down the bench to get away from him. Eventually, the sailor wakes up and finds himself alone. He finds Charlie and Helen on the bench, with her expressing considerable distress at this time, so he fights Chaplin off. Chaplin runs to a nearby bush and begins pulling up bricks from the side of the path to throw at the sailor. The sailor retaliates, and soon bricks are flying, hitting Charlie, Helen, the sailor, and two nearby policemen (Edwin Frazee and Edward Nolan). The policemen spot the sailor throwing bricks, but not Charlie, who plays innocent. The sailor tries to finger Charlie for one cop, while the other “comforts” Helen. Charlie knocks over the cop and the sailor and makes a run for it. The sailor and the cop start fighting and soon bricks are flying again. Charlie finds the girl again, over by the lake into which so many Keystone players have tumbled, and she knocks him over once, but they both laugh about it. The sailor runs over and Charlie knocks him into the lake. The two cops, now struggling with each other, sort things out and come over to challenge Charlie. He pushes them both in the lake, and Helen shoves him, but he grabs her as he goes over and everyone winds up in the drink.

I usually pronounce this film “ree-creation” (rather than “wreck-creation”), because it is sort of like a re-creation of a movie with a lot of missing elements. Enough of it exists for us to see that it is a typical “park comedy” of the type Chaplin frequently starred in at Keystone, but it’s hard to know how much is missing. Since Charlie was mostly doing one-or-two-reelers at the time, and what we have is about half a reel, it’s likely that more than half of it is missing. That said, there’s more or less a beginning, a middle, and an end here, so maybe we don’t need much more. Possibly just an intertitle to explain Charlie at the bridge and another at the beginning would clear things up adequately. The Tramp in this movie is hardly a nice person – he’s the first to throw a brick, for example – but it could be that his attempted suicide was an effort on Chaplin’s part to make him sympathetic. Charlie does some nice slapstick moves, including his fall at the bridge and his tripping of the sailor and police officer, but this isn’t one of his great triumphs, physically or emotionally.

Director: Charlie Chaplin

Camera: Frank D. Williams

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Helen Carruthers, Charles Bennett, Edwin Frazee, Edward Nolan

Run Time: 6 Min, 20 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music).

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August 14, 2020

A Busy Day (1914)

Although he had already started directing his own movies when this short was released, this is another example of Charlie Chaplin’s work with Mack Sennett as director, along with “Tillie’s Punctured Romance” and “The Fatal Mallet.” It repeats themes that Sennett and Chaplin had explored before, but with one big novelty thrown in.

The movie begins by showing us an audience gathered to see a parade. The background is filled with people who are probably genuine spectators, but there are four Keystone actors in front. These include Mack Swain and Phyllis Allen, and most importantly, Charlie himself, although he is dressed in drag and plays Mack’s wife. There’s a bit of roughhousing in the stands and some shots of a military parade going by, and then Mack sneaks off with Phyllis. A cameraman (Mack Sennet) sets up to shoot the parade in another shot and then we see Charlie realize she has been abandoned. She sees them running past the camera and sets off in hot pursuit, again ruining Sennett’s shot of soldiers marching by. She gets distracted by his efforts to remove her from the shot and begins posing for the camera, so Mack calls in a Keystone Kop (I think it’s Billy Gilbert). Soon Charlie is kicking and pushing both of them and they push her into another Kop (Ted Edwards), who shoves her back into camera view. This goes back and forth for a while, interrupted only by a shot of some naval boats in San Pedro Harbor.

Finally, Charlie remembers her true objective and goes after Mack and Phyllis, who are admiring the ships. She attacks them viciously with her umbrella. When the much larger Swain strikes back, she is once again shoved into a Keystone Kop and the slapstick violence starts to ramp up again. Swain is able to break away and find Phyllis near the launching of some motorboats while Charlie dances to a military band. She eventually find her husband and the “other woman” again, and they fight, this time with a large crowd gathered to watch in the background. The camera cuts to a new angle, showing that the fight has edge to the side of the dock, and soon Swain gives Charlie a shove and she does a double backflip into the harbor. The closing shot is of Charlie splashing around fruitlessly in the water.

About half of this movie is a straight remake of “Kid Auto Races,” except for the cross-dressing. It was common for Sennett to take advantage of a public spectacle by getting some actors quickly into costume and ad-libbing a slapstick comedy, although there’s more of a story here than in the earlier film. The spectators are pretty obviously not extras – a few stare at the camera, but most stare and laugh at the actors. Interestingly, I noticed that older women, far from seeming shocked, appeared to be the most entertained by Chaplin’s antics. This was the first time Chaplin had appeared in drag on film (though I assume he’d done it before on Vaudeville stages), and to the degree he had built up fans for his “Little Tramp” characterization, I have to assume his audience wouldn’t have recognized him at all like this (remember, it was only about four months earlier that the Tramp outfit was introduced). But his trademark physicality is fully on display here, something that was remarked on by a reviewer at the time. The final backflip has to be seen to be believed. This is also the first time he was teamed with Mack Swain, who would become a reliable foil in the years after Chaplin struck out on his own, perhaps most famously in “The Gold Rush.”

Director: Mack Sennett

Camera: Frank D. Williams

Starring: Charlie Chaplin, Mack Swain, Phyllis Allen, Mack Sennett, Billy Gilbert, Ted Edwards

Run Time: 5 Min, 37 secs

You can watch it for free: here (no music) or here (with music)

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