Chaplin at Keystone

by James L. Neibaur

Charlie Chaplin

The thirty-four short subjects and one feature Charlie Chaplin made at Mack Sennett’s Keystone Studios in 1914, his first year in movies, have long been the most difficult period of his career to assess. This is where Chaplin initially learned the rudiments of performing for the movie camera and first began directing his own films, so their historical importance is substantial. Until recently, however, these Keystone comedies remained the only portion of Chaplin’s filmography that had not been restored. Chaplin left Keystone after only one year. Due to his soaring popularity, however, his Keystone films were endlessly recut, retitled, and duplicated for rerelease. What eventually survived was a collection of grainy, faded, flickering images that were often imperceptible.

For the past several years, the British Film Institute has been working carefully to restore Chaplin’s Keystone comedies. It has been a particularly daunting task, often necessitating the use of material from several different prints for the restoration of just one film. With the help of such archivists as David Shepard at Blackhawk Films in America, Serge Bromberg at Lobster Films in France, the Cineteca Bologna in Italy, and UCLA’s Film and Television Archive, the Chaplin Keystones have now been restored to truly breathtaking quality, enabling Flicker Alley to release the complete set of thirty-four films in a four-disc DVD package.

This is, then, the best time for a revisionist approach to Chaplin’s Keystone period. Long dismissed, even by Chaplin scholars, as merely a primitive slapstick training ground for the truly great work he would soon achieve, the Keystone comedies are, in fact, brilliant. Cinematically, the films embraced the idea of movement within the frame to present the sort of unbridled energy that only a good knowledge of timing and editing could accomplish. Mack Sennett, who received his initial training while working for D.W. Griffith at Biograph, understood that rapid movement and frenetic activity would add to the excitement of slapstick humor. The audiences responded in kind, and the Keystone films quickly became very popular.

Chaplin was hired out of the British music halls, and was initially expected to fit neatly into this world of wild slapstick. His first film, Making A Living, directed by Henry Lehrman, was an inauspicious beginning, with Chaplin clad in top hat and suit, bulging his eyes and flailing his arms in the same manner as any comedian on the Keystone lot. Chaplin, however, already had a particular vision of how he could present the type of comedy he had been performing in the music hall, where he was adept at creating his own characters. Upon preparing for his next film, Mabel’s Strange Predicament, Chaplin went to the wardrobe department and threw together a variety of conflicting pieces of clothing, from a too-small coat, to baggy pants and big shoes. He pasted on a small mustache, grabbed a cane as a prop, and topped it with a derby. The little tramp was born.

Chaplin and Mabel Normand in Mabel's Strange Predicament

The second Chaplin Keystone to be released was actually the third one filmed. Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal., also directed by Lehrman, was the first opportunity for moviegoers to see Chaplin’s little tramp. The entirety of this six-minute film shows the tramp getting in the way of newsreel cameras trying to shoot a soapbox car race. Every time the little tramp waddles into camera range, the newsreel director pushes him out of the way. But the persistent tramp continues to find ways to get on camera, blocking the image being filmed by walking in front of the lens and striking different poses. The little tramp was something to which early twentieth-century immigrants in America in the audience could relate: a curious outsider being pushed aside by authority.

Kid Auto Races in Venice, Cal. effectively sets the tone for Chaplin’s entire Keystone output. Ogling women, hurling bricks at adversaries, kicking authority figures in the backside, Charlie was a scamp, someone who was not intimidated by authority, did not worry about social mores or intergender respect. His comedy was bold, uncompromising, but, unlike other Keystone comedians, it was filled with the sort of subtlety and nuance that would separate Chaplin from his comic brethren. A sly look to the camera, a quick nod, or a wink, the most minimal movement would be used to accent the more blatant Keystone gestures.

Keystone actors were not billed in the credits or advertisements, so theater owners were not aware of Chaplin’s name. They would contact the studio with requests for more films with “that little tramp fellow.” When a Chaplin comedy was playing at a local movie theater, a large photo of Charlie the tramp would be posted on the front window with the words, “I’m here today.” The concept of the movie star had been established.

Chaplin balked at the methods of such directors as Lehrman and George Nichols, who dismissed the newcomer’s headier ideas as being too time consuming. The first several Chaplin films such as Between Showers, His Favorite Pastime, and The Star Boarder were fitfully funny in the Keystone tradition. Chaplin was eager to contribute at a more creative level, however, to assume greater control over the making of his films, and not simply to act upon the ideas of another creator.

When Chaplin began directing his own films, he was allowed to explore his ideas more completely. The Chaplin Keystone that is most frequently singled out as something of a breakthrough is The New Janitor, which allows the audacious Charlie to emerge as a selfless hero. As the title character working in a bank, Charlie performs his custodial chores without notice by the busy tellers and pretentious bankers. When a teller stumbles upon a banker robbing from the safe, she is threatened at gunpoint. Charlie is alerted and bursts onto the scene like a veritable Superman, subduing the criminal. Once the police arrive, they initially mistake Charlie for the criminal, until they learn otherwise. Presenting the powerful as crooked and the worker as the hero, The New Janitor shows how aware Chaplin was of his moviegoing audience. It further increased his popularity.

 

Chaplin between takes in Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal.

From this point, Chaplin wrote and directed nearly all of his remaining Keystone productions. Continuing to maintain his screen character’s audacity (in more than one film Charlie is employed as a waiter, and engages in such activities as blowing his nose on the cloth he’s using to wipe down the tables), Chaplin also continued to investigate film’s various possibilities. His adversarial situations, such as a food fight in His Trysting Places, would match him against a much larger opponent (in this case, burly Mack Swain, whom he would use to even greater effect eleven years later in The Gold Rush). The lumbering big man vs. the nimble, surefooted Charlie offered the sort of contrast that added another layer to Chaplin’s screen character. Audiences already attracted to his antiauthoritarian brashness also had a rooting interest in his David vs. Goliath slapstick battles against much larger opponents. When he has similar confrontations with equally diminutive adversaries, such as Chester Conklin in Dough and Dynamite, they are performed as veritable slapstick ballets. It is this film, set in a bakery, where Chaplin presents Charlie adeptly balancing a tray filled with loaves of bread on his head, as he waddles and spins without incident. When he bends over to pick up another tray from the floor, however, the rest of the loaves plummet to the ground. It is the simple tasks that are out of his reach. Dough and Dynamite also shows how writer-director Chaplin was looking beyond merely a series of gags, here featuring a subplot about striking workers who later place a bomb inside a loaf of bread, and dupe a little girl into delivering it to the bakery (resulting in an explosive conclusion).

Towards the end of his Keystone tenure, Chaplin appeared in Tillie’s Punctured Romance, directed by Sennett, and chiefly notable as the screen’s first feature-length comedy. While Sennett’s direction was much broader, the occasional moments of subtlety in an otherwise very boisterous six reels suggest that the producer may have been learning from his most successful comedian. After completing His Prehistoric Past, Chaplin left Keystone for more money and even greater creative control at the Essanay Studios. Sennett could not compete with the amount other studios were willing to pay the most popular star in moving pictures.     

For those of us who have struggled with viewing Chaplin’s Keystone films, this new DVD box set is a revelation. Images that had once been bleached out to the point where facial expressions could not be discerned have been reconstituted so that the tiniest nuances and the subtlest gestures are detectable. Even a film such as Kid Auto Races at Venice, Cal., which had heretofore been represented by reasonably good prints, benefits from this restoration. We are now able to clearly see the faces of the onlookers who are there to simply watch the races, not realizing that the little fellow who wanders into camera range is actually a comedian working on a film. They are first confused, then amused, finally smiling and laughing at his antics. It is a filmed document of an audience reacting to the very first appearance of Charlie Chaplin, further enhancing its historical significance.

The Face on the Barroom Floor, long available in a shoddy print that even had the scenes in the wrong order, is corrected here. Laughing Gas, inspired by Chaplin’s misgivings about visiting the dentist, is another short that has been readily available since the days of 8mm projectors, but is presented here with beautiful image clarity. The only quibble regarding the restoration of these films would be the print of Recreation used, which is really no better than the grainy images to which we have long been accustomed. The titles preceding the film claim that no good preprint material is available on this title. There are Chaplin collectors, however, who have far better quality prints in their private collections.

The music by such noted silent film accompanists as Neil Brand, Robert Israel, and the Mont Alto Orchestra is solid throughout. For my taste, the forlorn strings that open Caught in the Rain tend to distract from the action, but this is a very minor concern. The music for Dough and Dynamite, on the other hand, is as much responsible for its successful presentation as the action on the screen and the clarity of the image.

The DVD box set includes such extras as Serge Bromberg’s Inside the Keystone Project, which deals with the restoration of these films, John Bengston’s Silent Traces: The Keystone Locations, which presents contemporary footage of areas where these comedies were shot ninety-six years earlier, and Chaplin at Keystone: The Tramp is Born, a lavishly-illustrated, forty-page booklet that features an essay by Jeffrey Vance and notes on each of the films.

Certainly the most fascinating extra in this package is a Ford Sterling film entitled The Thief Catcher, with a previously unknown appearance of Chaplin as a Keystone cop. This treasure was discovered quite by accident at an antique sale by collector Paul Gierucki. Labeled simply as “Keystone Films,” Gierucki bought it on impulse and was startled to discover it to be a Chaplin appearance that had not been known to exist.

Tillie's Punctured Romance, the first feature length comedy

Chaplin at Keystone effectively fills the gap in Charlie Chaplin’s filmography. In just one year, Chaplin experimented with pathos, female masquerade, and serious subplots, allowing us to witness the initial presentation of his comic ideas, many of which he would revisit later. With the Keystone films restored to such astonishing clarity, we can now clearly appreciate the genesis of Chaplin’s evolution from knockabout slapstick comic to perhaps the most important figure in the history of screen comedy.

 

James L. Neibaur is a film historian and educator who has written eight books on film.

 

Click here to buy Chaplin at Keystone.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Cineaste Publishers, Inc.

Cineaste,Vol.XXXVI No.2 2011

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